STEM and Gender Advancement (SAGA)

The STEM and Gender Advancement (SAGA) team project consists of:

 
UNESCO SAGA team

The technical team is composed of UNESCO specialists managing and overseeing the project:

• Ernesto Fernandez Polcuch, Chief of Section, Science Policy and Partnerships, UNESCO (Steering Committee)
• L. Anathea Brooks, Former Programme Specialist, Programme Coordination and Evaluation, UNESCO (Steering Committee)
• Alessandro Bello, Project Officer, UNESCO
• Kim Deslandes, Research and Statistical Assistant, UNESCO Institute for Statistics

 
SAGA Advisory Committee

This committee is comprised of selected international senior experts in gender equality, with focus on STI policy, statistics and indicators. This committee has for objectives to provide strategic input and advices to the SAGA UNESCO team, as well as share results widely.

Members of SAGA Advisory Committee are:

• Alice Abreu
  Former Director of GenderInSITE
• Tonya Blowers
  Coordinator, Organization for Women in Science for the Developing World (OWSD)
• Gloria Bonder
  Coordinator of the Global Network of UNESCO Chairs on Gender and the UNESCO Regional Chair on Women, Science and Technology in Latin America
• Saniye Gülser Corat
• Director, Division for Gender Equality, Office of the Director-General, UNESCO

• Alshefa Abdelgadir Hassan
  UNESCO Chair for Women in Sciences and Technology, Khartoum Sudan

• Marlene Kanga
  President of the Word Federation of Engineering Organisations (WFEO)

• Shirley Malcom
  Head, Education and Human Resources Programs, American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS)

• Verdiana Grace Masanja
  Professor of Computational Mathematics, Nelson Mandela African Institution of Science and Technology (NM-AIST)
• Roberta Pattono
  Directorate-General for Research and Innovation of the European Commission

• Elizabeth Pollitzer
  Director, Portia Ltd, Gender Summit, founder

• Ines Sánchez de Madariaga
  UNESCO Chair on Gender Equality Policies in Science, Technology and Innovation
• Martin Schaaper
  Senior Information and Communication Technology (ICT) Analyst, ICT Data and Statistics Division, International Telecommunication Union (SAGA Steering Committee Member until August 2017)
• Papa Seck
  Statistics Specialist, UN Women

In order to avoid overlapping and duplication of efforts and to increase the impact of its activities, the project has joined forces with several partners who are also working on gender equality in science. Nearly 20 international institutions are collaborating with SAGA beyond country level. Furthermore, several UNESCO field offices, National Commissions for UNESCO and UNESCO chairs are collaborating with the project.

Some of the partnerships among others are:

• In collaboration with Global Research Council (GRC) and World Council of Civil Engineers (WCCE) two surveys were developed to collect and make available sex-disaggregated data for comparative analysis.
• The Inter-American Development Bank (IADB) project, “Gender Gaps in Science, Technology and Innovation in Latin America and the Caribbean” used the SAGA approach and tools in the project. The project has been developed in close technical collaboration with UNESCO’s SAGA project and, in its three years of execution, interesting results have been achieved
• A partnership created with International Science Council and the project, “A Global Approach to the Gender Gap in Mathematical and Natural Sciences: How to Measure It, How to Reduce It?” for the period of 2017-2019. The SAGA STI GOL was used as the conceptual schema to capture elements of “good practice” of the database created in the framework of the ICS project, while the Working Paper 4 was used as a basis for the questionnaire “Global Survey of Mathematical, Computing, and Natural Scientists".
• A Partnership with the Columbus Association of European and Latin American universities, a UNESCO associated NGO, to develop the activity, “U-Benchmarking Club: Improving Women's Participation in STEM Programs” to share good practices in universities policies and strategies focused on improving access, recruitment, retention and empowerment of women in STEM programmes and their success in professional life. The information gathered was included in the SAGA database.
• A seminar was organized by the International School for Advanced Studies (SISSA) and GenderInSITE to discuss the potential implementation of a SAGA pilot survey on drivers and barriers at the institution to assess factors relating to gender in scientific careers and higher education.
• Members of the SAGA team are part of the steering committee for the upcoming publication of SheFigures, a very important publication on statistics on Women in Science.