International Workshop on "Women and Science / Technology" Network in Asia

History and Situation of the East Asian Workshops for Women Researchers


The East Asian Workshops for Women Researchers started in September, 2006, when the International Workshop of Women and Science/Technology Network in Asia was held in Nagoya for the first time. Before describing this workshop I will introduce two international workshops held in Paris and in Pohang in 2005.

A joint OECD‐French Government International Workshop on “Women in Scientific Careers:
Unleashing the Potential” was held in Paris and I gave a presentation, “The Present Condition and Problems of Women in Science and Technology in Japan.” After my presentation I felt many EU and OECD countries expected dispatching information from Asia on women researchers in science and technology. I was the only Asian participant. A second opportunity was brought to me by my being invited as a guest speaker at the APCTP international workshop. This experience made me realize that we need the chance to discuss women researchers in S&T in Asia. I was fortunate to win both a grant from the Toyota Foundation and a grant‐in‐aid for scientific research from MEXT.

The International Workshop of Women and Science/Technology Network in Asia was held with 17 speakers invited from China, Korea, Taiwan, Indonesia, India, and Japan. In all the countries, women researchers were strongly encouraged to continue their careers and various policies were implemented for the purpose of increasing the number of women students majoring in science and technology. However, it was difficult to find common bases for comparison among Asian countries. In June, 2007, “Symposium on Women and S&T” at the 21st Pacific Science Congress was held in Okinawa, Japan. Some of the members who had met for the first time in Nagoya in 2006 saw one another again and found new researchers. In July we invited two Taiwanese to Japan again in order to have a study meeting for statistical indexes. We opened our home page,
http://www.wstna.org/. This year was very fruitful because Prof. Lee was awarded APEC funding and she organized an APEC funded Workshop at Chonbuk National University in November, 2007. Many of us could join in the discussions again.

The International Conference on Woman Scientists was held in Yang‐Ming University, Taipei in 2008. In 2010 the 4S/JSSTS Joint Meeting was held in Tokyo in 2010. We could invite Prof. Tsai from Taiwan as a commentator on our workshop. Finally 2012 we gathered together to hold the International Workshop on Women and Science/Technology in East Asia. We now started compiling statistical comparisons for Korea, Japan, and Taiwan. 6 years have passed since we started this study. Now it is possible to compare statistical data for the three countries. It took a long time to arrive at this situation, because it was very rare to find sex‐disaggregated statistics in Asia at that time. 2012 is an exciting new starting for our cooperative study.