Women's groups attending the World Conference on Science were opening the champagne on Wednesday night (30 June) as news began to leak to them from the committee drafting the final conference documents that they had been successful in significantly enhancing all references to the need to improve the position of women in science.

There had earlier been warnings that women and women's issues might be marginalized. But after a determined campaign and the final adoption of the Declaration and Framework for Action (see opposite), female participants in the conference were unanimous in their enthusiastic approval of the final version of the two documents.

“It is the first time that [the gender issue] has entered the world science agenda,” says Sjamsiah Achmad, of the Indonesian Institute of Technology, in Jakarta, who had chaired the conference's ‘thematic session’ on gender-related issues. “We managed to get a whole new paragraph inserted into the Framework for Action. It is extraordinary.”

Wati Hermawati, another member of the Indonesian delegation, says she will produce gender indicators, through her work for the National Focal Point for Gender Science and Technology at the same institute. Statistics and data will be collected in areas such as the education and careers of women in science, and the impact of science and technology on women.

Amalia Bosia, a molecular biologist from the University of Turin and a member of the Italian delegation, says that the final documents adopted by the meeting appear to have taken into account some of the views expressed to Unesco and ICSU during the preparatory process. These included declarations from seven regional forums that had looked at the issue of women in science. “Some of the things that went in [to the documents] may be obvious, but the important thing is that they came from a general opinion,” says Bosia.

The success of the women's lobby at the conference was the result of a campaign that started more than a year ago, when representatives of the UN Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM) and the Once and Again Future Action Network (OFAN) decided that the conference was important.

These groups formed a gender networking group at the conference. The group lobbied non-governmental organizations, placed representatives in thematic meetings, analysed lists of delegates for gender bias, and even noted down the number of times that gender was mentioned during the plenary sessions.

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