In the Spring of 2004, the WCL Program on Information Justice and Intellectual Property, Women and the Law Program, and Journal of Gender, Social Policy, and the Law, sponsored an initial effort to bring scholars together to focus interdisciplinary attention on the interplay between intellectual property and gender. The following year, we built on the discussions from that first workshop by holding a second program highlighting the work of two scholars writing in this emerging area, Ann Bartow and Sonia Katyal. Following the symposium, these two scholars published their work in the Journal of Gender, Social Policy, and the Law. In 2006, we held a full day Symposium on intellectual property and gender, leading to a number of works published in the Journal of Gender, Social Policy, and the Law and other publications.
Topics we have discussed in our past meetings have ranged from: the impact on intellectual property law and policy on gender-related imbalances in wealth, cultural access, political power, and social control; creative production and gender; the effects of stereotyping and of actual and rhetorical feminization and masculinization of participant roles upon intellectual property stakeholders; the gendered development of IP doctrines and doctrinal categories; related issues in the teaching and practicing of intellectual property; and feminist jurisprudential insights about intellectual property law.
