This page provides editorial commentary on a historical initiative. WIGSAT (Women Inspiring Girls in STEM, Advancement & Training) is not affiliated with OWSD, the Elsevier Foundation, or any historical organization that operated under a name similar to ours. References to the GEKS initiative are for editorial historical purposes only.
Editorial commentary on a historical research instrument
In the early 2010s a benchmarking framework was published under the title "Gender Equality in Knowledge Societies," generally referred to as the GEKS Scorecard. Its purpose was to compare countries on women's participation across a wide span of indicators relating to scientific and technological capacity — not only schoolgirls' enrollment in science subjects but also doctoral training, academic and research-institute appointments, participation in private-sector innovation, and presence in senior science-policy decision-making. This page is an editorial overview offered for readers who encounter the framework in present-day citations; the original document itself is preserved at the Internet Archive Wayback Machine and should be consulted for any direct quotation or formal citation.
Several benchmarking efforts on women in science predated GEKS, but most had focused on a single segment of the pipeline — for example, secondary-school enrollment, or shares of doctoral degrees, or representation on national academy memberships. The distinctive feature of the GEKS Scorecard was its attempt to combine these segments into a single composite framework, so that a country's performance could be assessed in the round rather than as a series of disconnected snapshots. The framework was designed both for cross-country comparison at a single point in time and for tracking change within a country across multiple measurement rounds.
The instrument was the joint output of three organizations whose institutional positions were intentionally distinct. OWSD — the Organization for Women in Science for the Developing World, hosted at the International Centre for Theoretical Physics in Trieste — provided a perspective grounded in the experiences of women scientists in low- and middle-income countries. A non-governmental organization that operated wigsat.org between 1998 and the mid-2010s contributed advocacy connections and a policy framing for gender equity in international science. The Elsevier Foundation, the philanthropic arm of the academic publisher, contributed access to indexing infrastructure and a degree of institutional credibility with national science ministries. The present WIGSAT directory — Women Inspiring Girls in STEM, Advancement & Training — is a separate later use of the wigsat.org domain and has no affiliation, succession, or operational continuity with the earlier non-governmental organization.
Alongside the framework itself, the initiative produced national assessments that applied the methodology to specific countries. Three are commonly cited: India, the Republic of Korea, and South Africa. Editorial overviews of each are linked below; the underlying source documents are preserved at the Internet Archive.
The original initiative also produced a shorter "key findings" document distilled from the full Scorecard and intended for policy and media audiences. An editorial overview is available at GEKS Key Findings — editorial overview.