Filomina Chioma Steady is Professor of Africana Studies at Wellesley College, and is an expert on women and gender issues, specializing in Africa, the African Diaspora and in Third World Development. She has been a member of the Wellesley faculty since 1997 and chaired the Africana Studies Deparatment for ten years. She is an internationally recognized authority on women, international development, and women’s rights. She has played a leading role in research and policy analyses for three United Nations Plans of Action on the advancement women, and in mainstreaming gender in Agenda 21 as a Special Advisor, Director and Senior Consultant to the United Nations.
She received a Bachelor of Arts in government from Smith College, a Master of Arts in anthropology from Boston University, and Doctor of Philosophy (D.Phil.) 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 Distingushed Alumna Award from Smith College. She also held a Social Science Research Council postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard University’s School of Public Health.
Steady has been a professor at several universities in the United States including Yale, Wesleyan, Boston University, and Californa State University at Sacramento where she was also Chair of the Women’s Studies Program. She was a lecturer at the University of Sierra Leone, and holds or has held honorary positions as research fellow at the Institute of African Studies at the University of Sierra Leone, the Institute of Environmental Studies, and the Department of Afro-American Studies at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. Her basic research interests are on gender systems and theory in cross-cultural context; environment and sustainable development; the inter-sectionality of race, class and gender; environmental justice; development theories; and social transformation in Africa and the African Diaspora.
Professor Steady has authored and edited several books, monographs and articles, including the award-winning The Black Woman Cross-Culturally, 1981; ‘African Women, Industrialization and Another Development’, 1982; Women and Children First: Environment, Poverty and Sustainable Development, 1993; 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. 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 (with Remie Touré) 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, Class and Gender. Her most recent publications include, Women and Collective Action in Africa: Development, Democratization and Empowerment, 2007; Environmental Justice in the New Millennium: Global Perspectives on Race, Ethnicity, and Human Rights, 2009.
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 to UNIDO for the Fourth World Conference on Women held in Beijing. From 1984 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. In 1999 she chaired ‘The Kobe Declaration to halt the Tobacco Epidemic among Women and Girls’, at a World Health Organization conference in Kobe, Japan.
Steady is a founding member of the Association of African Women for Research and Development (AAWORD). She is former 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 women’s creativity in rural life all over the world.
Professor Steady serves or has served 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; the Commission on the Anthropology of Women; and the Executive Board of the Association for the Study of the Worldwide African Diaspora (ASWAD).