Perspectives on Gender in Science, Technology, and Innovation: A Review of Sub-Saharan Africa's Science Granting Councils and Achieving the Sustainable Development Goals

Abstract

Africa's focus on science, technology, and innovation (STI) has grown over the last decade, with emerging examples of good practice. There are however numerous challenges to sustainable development in Africa; for example, inequalities within and among African countries are rising and enormous disparities of opportunity, wealth, and power persist. While policy makers and organizations have put increasing emphasis on integrating gender into STI policies and initiatives as a means to achieve gender equality for all women and girls, inequality remains a key challenge to continental sustainable development. STI funders such as the Science Granting Councils (SGCs) in Africa are key players in national innovation systems. They advise and facilitate policy and program development, disburse funds, build research capacity, set and monitor research agendas, manage bilateral and multilateral STI agreements, and assess the communication, uptake, and impact of research. They, therefore, have a major role to play in enabling countries to achieve SDG5. This study assessed the current actions in gender mainstreaming across the SGCs and the status of gender research and collaboration in participating countries. Our findings provide evidence of uneven progress in promoting gender equality in the operations of the SGCs, including funding research and promoting the integration of gender dimensions in research content and curricula. All SGCs emphasized national commitments to gender, and the importance of gender in STI, but acknowledged that at the structural and institutional levels there was a misalignment between policy and practice. As expected, more men than women were employed across most levels at the SGCs and held positions of seniority and decision making. Most of the SGCs had very limited or no gender-related funding programs to promote gender and STI or to eliminate the barriers that women scholars face. This resulted in persistent inequalities in who received funding, the size of the grants they received, and in the knowledge production, collaboration, and the impact on their country's gender-related research. These findings suggest that SGCs need to strengthen their actions to mainstream gender if they are to achieve success with SDG5.

Factors that affect scientific publication in Africa—A gender perspective

“…The role of Science Granting Councils 1 (SGCs), as providers of researcher grants, scholarships and funding for science in general (see Mouton, 2019 , for instance), in propagating the gender gap is also mentioned in the literature. Jackson et al ( 2022 ) assessed the sub-Saharan Africa's SGCs and the status of gender research and collaboration. Their results indicate that most of the SGCs had very limited or no gender-related funding programs to deal with the challenges that women scholars face.…”

“…The role of Science Granting Councils (SGCs), as providers of researcher grants, scholarships and funding for science in general (see Mouton, 2019, for instance), in propagating the gender gap is also mentioned in the literature. Jackson et al (2022) assessed the sub-Saharan Africa's SGCs and the status of gender Further research published on South African female academics suggests, as explanations for the gender gap in research output, their preference for teaching over research (even viewing teaching as a "calling"), together with a lack of confidence, skills, capacity, and commitment to undertake and publish research (Schulze, 2005;Boshoff and Bosch, 2012;Garnett and Mahomed, 2012;Obers, 2014Obers, , 2015Callaghan, 2017;Chitsamatanga and Rembe, 2019;Ramohai, 2019). In addition to either voluntarily-chosen or allocated teaching commitments, heavy administrative workloads have also been mentioned (Zulu, 2013;Obers, 2015) or identified as the main barrier to publishing among women (Garnett and Mahomed, 2012).…”

Responsible models and indicators: challenges from artificial intelligence

“…Within the wide context of scientific topics, such as science of science, our community has undertaken commendable efforts in analyzing gender inequality (Jackson et al, 2022 ) and crafting inclusive metrics (Pourret et al, 2022 ). However, a significant practical challenge lies in scaling up these analyses from specific regions, individual disciplines, and singular data sources to comprehensive global studies with integrated knowledge graphs.…”

A PowerPack of SuperScientists: An innovative concept by African scientists to address gender bias and inequity in science

“…In the USA, scientific faculty and leadership positions are dominated by men and white people while Black and Hispanic women are poorly represented in these ranks 7 . The sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) Science Granting Council (SGC) who are key players of African science innovation were also reported to have more man than women holding positions across most levels of employment especially leadership positions 8 . The underrepresentation of women, and in particular Black women, in scientific leadership positions costs science and society.…”