Women in International STEM Policy Research

Women have shaped international STEM policy research since the field professionalized in the 1970s - through the early measurement frameworks, the cross-national comparisons, and the contemporary work on gender, climate, and digital technology.

The long arc

The discipline that today goes by names like "gender and STEM policy" or "women in science and technology research" professionalized over the past four decades, and women researchers have been disproportionately responsible for both the foundational empirical work and the analytical frameworks that followed.

Major centres of work

• UNESCO - has produced cross-country data on women in research since the late 1990s.
• OECD Directorate for Science, Technology and Innovation - gender-and-STEM analytical work for over twenty years.
• OWSD (Organization for Women in Science for the Developing World) - the single most-active international body specifically focused on women scientists in lower-income contexts.
• GenderInSITE - housed at the InterAcademy Partnership, focused on gender dimensions of science, innovation, technology and engineering policy globally.
• The European Commission's Gender Sector Group - produces She Figures and shapes Horizon Europe gender requirements.
• EIGE - European Institute for Gender Equality.

Contemporary research agenda

• Gender and AI - both the gender of AI researchers and the gendered consequences of AI systems for women users.
• Gender, climate, and STEM - the role of women researchers in climate science and gendered impacts of climate change on STEM workforces.
• The mid-career retention problem - why women leave STEM at higher rates 5-15 years post-PhD.
• Decolonizing women-in-STEM research - critique of frameworks built primarily on OECD-country data.
• Intersectional measurement - moving beyond binary gender to capture race, class, disability, and geographic factors.