Filomena Steady

Filomina Chioma Steady is Professor and Chair of Africana Studies at Wellesley College and is an expert on gender issues specializing in Africa, the African Diaspora and in Third World Development. She has been on the Wellesley faculty since 1997. She is an internationally recognized authority on Gender and international development. She has played a leading role in research and policy analyses for three International Plans of Action on the advancement of women and in mainstreaming gender in Agenda 21 as a Special Advisor, Director and Senior Consultant to the United Nations.

She received a B.A. from Smith College, an M.A. in anthropology from Boston University and a D.Phil. (Ph.D.) degree in social anthropology from Oxford University, Oxford, England. She is the recipient of several awards including the Ioma Evans-Pritchard Research Award from Oxford University and the Otelia Cromwell Distinguished Alumna Award from Smith College. She also held a Social Science Post Doctoral Fellowship at the Harvard School of Public Health.

Steady has been a professor at several universities in the United States including Yale, Wesleyan, Boston University and California State University in Sacramento where she was also Chair of the Women's Studies Program. She was a lecturer at the University of Sierra Leone, and currently holds honorary positions as research fellow at the Institute of Environmental Studies, University of Wisconsin in Madison and the University of Sierra Leone. Her basic research interests are on gender systems in cross-cultural context; the environment and sustainable development; the intersectionality of race, class and gender; development theories and social transformation in Africa and the African Diaspora.

She has authored or edited several books, monographs and articles including The Black Woman Cross-Culturally, 1981; African Women, Industrialization and Another Development, 1982; Women and Children First: Environment, Poverty and Sustainable Development, 1993. In commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the United Nations, she chaired the Vienna Seminar dedicated to women and the United Nations and gender issues, and was co-editor of the resulting book entitled: Women and the United Nations: Reflections and New Horizons, 1995. In addition, she has been published widely in periodicals and journals such as American Anthropologist, Feminist Studies, Development Dialogue, Environmental Values, Nutritional Education, The Earth Times and Race and Class and Gender.Her most recent publications include Women and the Amistad Connection: Sierra Leone Krio Society, 2001 and Black Women, Globalization and Economic Justice: Studies from Africa and the African Diaspora, 2002. She is currently completing a study on women and social movements in Africa.

Professor Steady was Special Advisor for Women, Environment and Development to the Secretary-General of the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (The Earth Summit) held in Rio de Janeiro in 1992. In 1995 she was appointed Special Advisor on Women held in Beijing. From1984 to 1986 she was a Director of the United Nations Division for the Advancement of Women responsible for the 1985 World Conference on Women held in Nairobi. In addition, she has served as a consultant to several international organizations within and outside the United Nations System, on Africa, gender issues, the environment and development.

She is a founding member of the Association of African Women for Research and Development (AAWORD). Steady is President of the Women's World Summit Foundation, an international non-governmental organization based in Geneva, Switzerland, dedicated to promoting the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women and the Convention on the Rights of the Child. The association also annually awards prizes for womenıs creativity in rural life to thirty female laureates from rural areas all over the world.

Professor Steady serves on several advisory boards including the Encyclopedia of Third World Women, the Steering Committee on Women in Least Developed Countries, the Committee for promoting African women in science and education and the Commission on the Anthropology of Women.

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Profile last updated: 8/06