By 2010, the international conversation about women in science had acquired a new and urgent subplot: climate. Climate research had, over the preceding decade, moved from a specialist concern of atmospheric scientists and oceanographers to the centre of international science policy, with the IPCC's Fourth Assessment Report in 2007 having crystallised scientific consensus in terms that demanded policy response. The question for organisations like GASAT — whose mandate was gender equity in science, not climate science per se — was how these two policy streams intersected. The 12th GASAT conference took that question seriously.
The answer, as it emerged across the conference sessions, was that they intersected in at least two directions. First, women researchers from developing nations, particularly those in fields connected to food security, water resources, ecology, and environmental health, had practical stakes in climate science that made the question of their access to research funding and international collaboration networks not merely a gender-equity matter but a science-quality matter. Second, the institutions of climate-science funding — large international research programmes, national funding agencies, and multilateral scientific bodies — replicated the same structural biases that the gender-in-science literature had documented in other fields.
Climate Science and the Developing-Nation Research Gap
The case made repeatedly at GASAT 12 was that the countries most vulnerable to climate change — those in the tropical belt, those with coastal exposure, those with agriculture-dependent economies and limited adaptive capacity — were precisely the countries with the weakest research infrastructure for studying those vulnerabilities. A woman ecologist working on savannaland dynamics in Mali or flood-risk assessment in Bangladesh was doing science that was, by any reasonable calculus, more urgently needed than much of what was being funded by large European research councils. She was also doing it with less equipment, less connectivity, fewer graduate students, and less access to the data-sharing networks that made modern climate science possible.
This is not a new structural critique — it is a variant of the same argument that had been made about the global distribution of health research, agricultural research, and environmental monitoring for decades. What was newer at GASAT 12 was the specific data on how this structural gap interacted with gender. Women were a higher share of the scientific workforce in biology, ecology, and environmental science in many developing nations than in the physical sciences and engineering — the fields that had historically attracted more institutional support. This meant that climate-adjacent research, the kind most needed in the most vulnerable regions, was both disproportionately staffed by women and disproportionately underfunded. The policy implication was that addressing the gender gap in climate-science funding was also, practically, addressing a gap in the science itself.
Sustainability Science and the Curriculum Debate
A second strand at GASAT 12 engaged with sustainability science as an emerging curricular category — how should science education, particularly for girls and women, be oriented toward the challenges of the twenty-first century? The conference hosted sessions that examined how secondary and tertiary science curricula in different world regions were or were not incorporating sustainability science, environmental systems thinking, and the interdisciplinary methods that climate research required.
The pedagogical dimension was not merely about adding sustainability content. Several presenters argued that sustainability science, as a problem-oriented, interdisciplinary field that explicitly engaged with social and political dimensions of scientific knowledge, offered an opportunity to reshape science education in ways that might be more engaging for girls who had been turned off by the purely technical, context-free presentation of physical sciences in many school systems. This argument was contested — some participants were skeptical that "relevance" framing was the right tool for broadening girls' participation, preferring structural interventions over curricular redesigns — but it produced some of the conference's more substantive pedagogical debates.
OFAN and Sustainable Development: The Overlap
The Once and Future Action Network (OFAN), WIGSAT's partner organisation focused on women in sustainable development, had a presence at GASAT 12 that reflected the growing convergence between the two organisations' agendas. OFAN's work on women's participation in sustainable development — including in local environmental governance, community-based natural resource management, and development policy — mapped naturally onto the climate-justice themes that were running through GASAT 12.
The distinction between a "women in science" agenda and a "women in sustainable development" agenda was becoming less sharp than it had been in GASAT's earlier years. Climate change made that convergence almost inevitable: the science of climate change, the policy of climate response, and the community-level adaptive practices that OFAN supported were not cleanly separable. Women researchers who worked at this intersection — environmental scientists with development policy engagement, or development practitioners with scientific training — were the natural constituency of both organisations, and GASAT 12 was one of the occasions when that shared constituency was most visible.
Equity in International Research Funding
The conference produced several policy documents addressing the specific question of how international climate-science funding bodies could better reach women researchers in developing nations. The standard critique was well-rehearsed: large international research programmes, including those of the CGIAR system and the various IPCC-associated working groups, tended to replicate the networks and institutional affiliations of already-privileged researchers. Applications from institutions at less-prestigious addresses were at a structural disadvantage that went beyond the quality of the science and had more to do with the social networks within which funding decisions were made.
The proposals that emerged were incremental rather than transformative — requirements for gender disaggregation in reporting on funded researchers, encouragement for co-principal-investigator structures that supported earlier-career women from developing institutions, and advocacy for dedicated funding windows for climate research originating in the most-vulnerable regions. Whether these recommendations were ultimately acted upon in the subsequent years was a different question; their articulation at GASAT 12 placed them on the record of an organisation that had genuine standing in international science-policy conversations.
What Had Changed Since GASAT 11
Comparing the Mauritius conference in 2007 with the 2010 meeting offered a useful diagnostic of how quickly the policy framing had shifted. Three years earlier, the dominant tension was between participation-focused interventions and institutional-reform arguments. By 2010, that argument had substantially been resolved in favour of institutional reform — not because all participation problems had been solved, but because the evidence for structural barriers was sufficiently robust that it had become the default analytical frame, at least within the GASAT community.
The newer tensions at GASAT 12 were between a global-North framing of gender equity in science and a global-South framing that was less interested in counting women in corporate research and development and more interested in the conditions for women to do the kind of science that their own communities needed. This tension was not resolvable within a biennial conference, but its presence at GASAT 12 suggested that the organisation was genuinely grappling with the multiplicity of what "women in science" meant across very different contexts.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is GASAT's connection to climate science?
GASAT's connection to climate science is not through climate research itself but through the intersection of gender equity in science with the specific challenges facing women researchers in the developing nations most affected by climate change. GASAT 12 examined how the funding and institutional structures of international climate science reproduced gender and geographic inequities.
What was OFAN's role at GASAT 12?
The Once and Future Action Network (OFAN), focused on women in sustainable development, had overlapping themes with GASAT 12's sustainability-science strand. OFAN's work on women's participation in environmental governance and development policy connected to GASAT's science-policy concerns in ways that were increasingly visible as climate change made the boundary between science and development policy more porous.
What did GASAT 12 recommend on research funding equity?
Conference participants advocated for gender disaggregation in reporting on funded researchers, co-investigator structures to support early-career women at less-privileged institutions, and dedicated funding windows for climate research from the most climate-vulnerable regions. These were advocacy positions aimed at multilateral funding bodies and national science agencies.
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