The 11th Gender and Science and Technology (GASAT) conference, held in Mauritius in September 2007, arrived at a moment of genuine tension within the international women-in-science movement. Two decades of conferences, policy papers, and advocacy programmes had moved the needle on enrollment statistics in the industrialised world — more women were completing undergraduate science degrees than at any previous point in history — yet the conversation in Mauritius kept returning to a dispiriting arithmetic: the numbers at the entry level were improving, but the numbers at every subsequent career stage were not.
That gap between graduation statistics and research careers was not new. What was different at GASAT 11 was the analytical framing delegates were bringing to it. The conference's programme reflected an emerging consensus that the "participation problem" — how to recruit girls and young women into science — was both largely solved in many OECD nations and also, on reflection, somewhat beside the point. The deeper problem was institutional: the structures that governed hiring, promotion, grant allocation, and research leadership in universities and government laboratories were not neutral. They encoded preferences, sometimes explicit, more often tacit, for the career patterns of people who did not bear primary domestic responsibility. Fixing the pipeline without fixing the institutions at the other end of it was, as one session put it, filling a leaking container.
Mauritius as a Host: Symbolism and Substance
The choice of Mauritius for GASAT 11 was not incidental. Mauritius had, by the mid-2000s, positioned itself as a regional hub for higher education and science policy on the African continent — its university system was expanding, its government was investing in an "ICT hub" strategy for economic diversification, and it sat at the intersection of African, South Asian, and Francophone educational traditions that were all well-represented in GASAT's membership.
For a conference whose founding identity was explicitly international — GASAT began in 1981 as a corrective to the Anglocentric and North American dominance of women-in-science policy conversation — holding the 11th meeting in the Indian Ocean region carried a statement. The concerns of women scientists in Sub-Saharan Africa, South and Southeast Asia, and the Caribbean were not peripheral to GASAT's agenda; they were constitutive of it.
In practical terms, the Mauritius hosting also shaped the thematic emphasis on science funding asymmetries. Delegates from developing nations had long argued that the gender question in science could not be separated from the resource question: a woman researcher at a university in Mozambique or Nepal was disadvantaged not only by gender discrimination but by the chronic underfunding of the institutions where she worked, the limited access to laboratory infrastructure, and the near-impossibility of building international research collaborations without either leaving her country or acquiring funding that routinely went to researchers at better-resourced institutions.
The Institutional Reform Turn
The conference's opening plenary set the frame for what would become the dominant thread across sessions: the inadequacy of "add women and stir" approaches to gender equity in science. This phrase — by 2007 a standard target of critique in feminist science-studies literature — described the policy pattern of creating women's programmes, women's quotas, women's scholarships, and women's mentorship schemes without examining the baseline conditions that made them necessary. Several paper presenters at GASAT 11 drew on work by researchers including Wendy Faulkner, whose studies of gender in engineering environments had documented the pervasive, informal mechanisms through which women were positioned as outsiders in technical departments even when formal policies were equitable.
The institutional reform focus had concrete policy implications. If the problem was in hiring committees, then interventions needed to target hiring committees — their composition, their criteria, the weight given to teaching and mentorship relative to grant income, the use of letters of recommendation in systems where recommenders were more likely to describe women's social qualities than their scientific ones. These arguments were not new in the academic literature in 2007, but their presence at a practitioner-oriented policy conference like GASAT — attended by science administrators, education ministry officials, and university programme directors alongside researchers — represented a translation of academic insight into policy-facing advocacy.
Developing Nations and the Structural Equity Question
One of the more analytically demanding sessions at GASAT 11 examined the specific situation of women researchers in lower-income nations, where the structural barriers were compounded. The "leaky pipeline" metaphor — which described women's progressive attrition from science through the career stages — was subject to critique for a different reason in this context: the pipeline itself was inadequately built. Research infrastructure, laboratory equipment, journal access, and the basic condition of reliable electricity and connectivity were not equally distributed globally. Gender equity in science could not be meaningfully pursued in isolation from this material reality.
Delegates from several African nations documented the specific pattern of "brain circulation" — women who completed doctoral training abroad, often in Europe or North America, and faced the choice between remaining in institutions with better resources or returning to home institutions that needed them most but could offer less. The conference did not resolve this tension — it is, structurally, a function of global research-funding inequality that exceeds the mandate of any single advocacy organisation — but its documentation was itself a form of policy contribution.
From Participation to Retention: The Career-Stage Data
The empirical core of the conference, running through multiple sessions and the closing policy discussion, was a close examination of career-stage data from countries and regions where longitudinal tracking had been attempted. The picture was consistent across very different national contexts: women's attrition from research careers was not primarily happening at the entry level. It was concentrated at the transition from postdoctoral researcher to independent scientist, and again at the transition from early-career faculty to tenured or permanent research positions.
These were the moments, the data suggested, when the intersection of career demands and domestic responsibilities was most acute — when the expectation of high mobility (the "opportunity cost" of staying at one's current institution versus taking a position elsewhere), of intensive publication output, and of the invisible labour of committee service and student supervision all peaked simultaneously. Women at these career stages were not, the evidence suggested, less ambitious or less capable than their male counterparts. They were, in aggregate, bearing a larger share of domestic responsibility, receiving less informal mentorship, and being evaluated by criteria that systematically undervalued their contributions relative to the metrics that counted most for promotion.
GASAT and the International Policy Network
GASAT's relationship to the broader international women-in-science policy ecosystem was a recurrent theme at the conference. By 2007, the landscape included UNESCO's women-in-science programmes, the L'Oréal-UNESCO For Women in Science fellowship programme (then in its ninth year), UNIFEM, and a growing network of national science funding agencies that were beginning to require gender analysis in research grant applications. GASAT's niche within this ecosystem was its bottom-up, practitioner orientation: it was not a treaty body or a funding agency but a network of researchers, educators, and advocates sharing evidence across national boundaries.
The question of how GASAT's analytical outputs — conference proceedings, working papers, policy briefs — fed into the decisions of the larger institutions that held actual funding and regulatory authority was debated at GASAT 11 with some candour. The organisation had influence on the conversation; it was less clear how directly that influence translated into institutional behaviour at the universities and ministries where change actually needed to happen.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is GASAT?
GASAT (Gender and Science and Technology) is an international association established in 1981 to address gender equity in science and technology education and research. It convenes biennial international conferences that bring together researchers, educators, and policymakers from across the world, with particular emphasis on international and developing-nation perspectives.
Where was GASAT 11 held?
The 11th GASAT conference was held in Mauritius in September 2007. Mauritius was chosen in part because of its position as a regional hub for higher education and science policy on the African continent, and the location reinforced GASAT's international, non-Anglocentric identity.
What was the main theme of GASAT 11?
The central analytical thread was the shift from a "participation" framing — recruiting more women into science — toward an "institutional reform" framing: examining and changing the structures in universities and research organisations that governed hiring, promotion, and funding in ways that disadvantaged women researchers even after recruitment goals had been partially met.
What does the "leaky pipeline" metaphor mean in this context?
The "leaky pipeline" describes the pattern of women's progressive attrition from science careers as they advance through the stages from student to researcher to independent scientist. The metaphor was itself critiqued at GASAT 11 for focusing attention on individual women leaving rather than on the institutional conditions that made staying less viable.
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