Does the global north still dominate the international women's movement? A network analysis of women's international organizations, 1978-2008

By both framing issues and shaping agendas, women’s international nongovernmental organizations, or WINGOs, actively promote women’s rights. Although WINGOs have been around since the late 1800s, their presence on the international stage has increased over time. As the international women’s movement has grown in size, individuals participating in WINGOs have also changed. During the first wave of women’s organizing, White Western women dominated the international women’s movement. During the second wave of women’s organizing, women of the global South increasingly participated. Yet, the degree to which the South has closed the gap in women’s international organizations is currently unknown. In this paper, we collect network data on more than 500 universal and regional WINGOs founded between 1875 and 2008. For each organization, we code whether it has a feminist orientation. We then construct affiliation matrices every five years from 1978 to 2008. We analyze the global North-South divide, for both feminist and non-feminist networks, in three ways. First, we use visual network tools to explore and display network structure and how countries in the global South are situated in networks over time. Second, we generate measures to quantify changes in country network position. We use these measures to test whether countries in the global South do, in fact, become more central in WINGO networks over time. Third, we use network methods to identify cohesive subsets, or cliques, of countries in WINGO networks. That is, we examine the extent to which countries in the West and the global South form clusters and how membership in those clusters changes in different time periods. Overall, analyses of if and when regional clusters form can help us to understand how changes in network structure link to changing power dynamics in the international women’s movement.