Women’s Interest Group (WIG)

The Women’s Interest Group (WIG) raises awareness of the global gender inequalities among women, men and those people who identify as gender-fluid and non-binary. It raises awareness and advocates for human rights and social justice from a social work perspective. It focuses on the structural and personal inequalities experienced especially by women in the areas of education, paid and unpaid work, violence against women and girls, the gendered ethics of care, women reproductive rights, gender pay, and pension gaps, gender equality in academia and the loss of women across the career trajectory and their absence from senior academic positions and other identified critical issues.

The Women’s Interest Group has been represented on the Board of Directors since 1992, an important development achieved by the leadership of Professor Lena Dominelli (UK) and Professor Carolyn Noble (Australia). It developed from the Women’s Caucus Group, founded in Montreal in 1984 with Professor Joan Gilroy of Dalhousie University in Halifax Canada as the first chair.

In 1992 in Washington DC, USA the Women’s Caucus Group changed the name to the Women’s Interest Group and was chaired by Professor Janice Wood Wetzel. Since then the WIG has had a seat on the Executive Board of the IASSW. Since its inception, the WIG has focussed on identifying and raising awareness of women’s issues for social work, through conferences and symposiums, promoting women’s issues through the social work curriculum and an annual survey on teaching gender and women’s human rights issues across the member schools.