Gender studies | April 2022

Online event 1–30 April 2022
International Conference on Gender Studies in Africa, hosted by the School of Women & Gender Studies, Makerere University, Feb 2022

As in April every year, Women in Red is once again focusing on women in gender studies. This is a particularly important event for Women in Red as it is thanks to the activities of academics in the 1970s that universities began to include gender and ethnic studies in their curricula. As a result, we have become increasingly aware of the traditional misrepresentation of women's achievements and are now able to draw on on a wide range of pertinent resources. The pioneers involved may not qualify for biographies on academic grounds (many never became full professors) but they nevertheless achieved notability as activists and writers. Those of you who attended university could usefully examine the development of gender studies in your institution, identifying the women who played an important part in launching gender initiatives. If you do not have time to write about them yourself, please add them to our crowd-sourced list (or simply list them under Redlists below) with one or two good secondary sources.

In addition, as we are promoting interest in translation this month, the Wikidata list (following crowd-sourced names) includes many women active in gender studies who have articles in other languages. Why not include some of them among the articles you translate?

Anyone can take part in this event. We hope both inexperienced and seasoned editors will join us in creating biographies and other articles about women in gender studies, as well as their achievements, writings, organizations, and awards. This virtual editathon allows enthusiasts wherever they may be to participate in our initiative. Contributors are of course also welcome to add articles on any other notable women who deserve to be covered, for example under our #1day1woman priority.

The main goals of the event are:

• to encourage inexperienced editors and show them how they can contribute to Wikipedia by creating biographies of some of the world's most prominent women
• to draw the attention of more experienced editors to the need for concerted action on a specific area
• to support Wikipedia in combating the systemic bias against the coverage of women and women's works
• to promote the new/improved articles and images through social media (Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter)

What else?

• Below, you'll see a section where you can list the articles you create this month, and another section where you can add the images you have uploaded to Commons.
• This essay on creating women's biographies and our Ten Simple Rules might be helpful to newer editors.
• If you tweet about any of the articles, or upload any of the images to Pinterest, please indicate you have done so next to the article name.