Gender Inequality in West Africa: A Writing Workshop for Female ECRs

By Rachel Alsop, Henrice Altink, Nana Akua Anyidoho, Nana Aba Amfo, Amosua K. Darkwah, Charlotte Wrigley-Asante, and Helen Yidah,

There is a paucity of articles on Africa in leading gender studies journals, and those published are mostly by scholars from universities in the Global North. For example, a search for ‘women AND Africa’ for the Journal of Women’s History, Women’s History Review and Gender and History – the leading women’s history journals – on the arts&humanities database of the Web of Science returned 79 articles but only 2 were by authors based in African universities (Nigeria and South Africa). In addition, African universities have started to place more emphasis on publications in reputable, peer-reviewed journals in application and promotion processes but few offer training to achieve this aim. Such training is particularly important for women, who make up only a small proportion of research and teaching staff and are severely underrepresented at senior levels in African universities.

The workshop

To address these two concerns - a lack of articles on Africa in leading gender studies journals and publication in peer-reviewed journals as a career path for African female scholars - Rachel Alsop and Henrice Altink from the University of York and Nana Aba Amfo and Charlotte Wrigley-Asante from the University of Ghana organised a four-day online writing workshop for female PhD students and ECRs from West Africa who work on gender inequality in the arts and humanities and social sciences, supported by writing workshop grant from the British Academy. Based on their experiences as editors for the Journal of Gender Studies and Women’s History Review, respectively, Rachel and Henrice gave presentations on the writing and publication process, interspersed with break-out room discussions. At the end of each day, participants completed a short writing assignment,  which was commented upon by the break-out room facilitators. Alongside the four organisers, the workshop included three other members of staff from the University of Ghana, who acted as break-out room facilitators: Helen Yitah, Nana Akua Anyidoho, and Akosua K. Darkwah. On the last day, the team was joined by the editor-in-chief of the Journal of Gender Studies, Blu Tirhol, who shared a wealth of tips on how to get published, based on her long-standing editorial experience.

Mentoring circle

A lack of mentoring and networking possibilities are some of the key barriers to career advancement for women in African universities. To address this, the 32 workshop participants  from Ghana and Nigeria were divided into small groups, based on their discipline and research focus, and they met in each break-out room discussion. They will form a mentoring circle, led by the break-out room facilitator, that will meet at least one hour a month for the next six months. This opportunity to be mentored was singled out by participants as one of the most useful aspects of the workshop. But they also greatly welcomed the plenary sessions which had increased their understanding of the publication process, including peer review, and had highlighted the need to research journals to ensure that articles are within scope and also to avoid predatory journals.

Online delivery – challenges and opportunities

The workshop was initially envisioned as a two-day workshop at the University of Ghana but the pandemic necessitated a shift to online delivery. While this enabled us to increase the number of participants and enlarged the workshop team, it also brought various challenges. First, how do you create a sense of cohort amongst participants when there are no coffee, lunch or dinner breaks?  To address this, we asked each participant to record a two-minute video in which they gave a brief introduction, including their main research interests and the article that they were going to work on during the workshop. These were turned into one video and shared with participants and facilitators a week before the workshop. Workshop participants worked on a range of topics from gender-based violence and reproductive health to women’s participation in politics and feminist Nigerian playwrights.

Second, how do you break-up a two-day programme into short online sessions? As our own experiences of attending online meetings and events had shown us, it is harder to concentrate in an online than in a face-to-face event. We therefore decided to spread the workshop over four mornings of three hours each. And third, how do you deal with the numerous technical challenges of online delivery, ranging from poor connectivity and creating multiple breakout rooms to sharing homework? We set up a google drive for participants to upload their homework so that facilitators could comment directly on the assignments without having to download them. We also made sure that at the end of each day, participants received an email with instructions for homework, including links to the google drive folders. 

The responses to the workshop survey and also in-workshop comments have shown that there is a great demand from female ECRs for hands-on training in getting published in peer review journals. Feedback from the participants has been positive. As one ECR explained after the workshop, ‘Writing and publishing have been demystified to me. It has indeed raised my confidence level’. Another stated: ‘This workshop has been phenomenal. Now I know the imperative of sharing my research ideas with others [and] how to plan my schedule to accommodate my research goals’. We therefore hope to run this workshop again next year. Delivering a writing workshop online is relatively low-cost, except for staff time, as universities subscribe to Zoom, Microsoft Teams and other online meeting tools, and there are also various free online data sharing systems. However, as internet connectivity posed a considerable problem in breakout room discussions, we will try to secure funding to provide each workshop participant with a dongle.