Re-valuing women's knowledge

Women's knowledge has often been seen as 'a whole set of knowledges that have been disqualified as inadequate to their task or insufficiently elaborated: naive knowledges, located low down on the hierarchy, beneath the required level of cognition or scientificity' (Foucault 1980, p. 82). The purpose of this paper is to explore the assertion that women's knowledges are inadequate and to document ways in which they are marginalised so that the hierarchical nature of scientific practice can be understood and the contributions of women and all those from the Global South can be recognised and facilitated. Revaluing women's knowledge is recognised as one of the most direct methods of changing the way a society works. A vast literature (eg Sen 1999) has argued that women's knowledges are a key factor in development and have been shown to lead to poverty alleviation, to the development of active citizens and to the creation of a more open and democratic society. Possibilities for the revaluing of women's knowledges and the democratization of access to scientific knowledge using information and communication technologies are considered, focussing on the concepts of open access and the information commons.