Development Alternatives with Women for a New Era (DAWN) is a transnational feminist network of scholars, researchers and activists from the global South. DAWN works under the gender, ecology and economic justice (GEEJ) framework, which highlights the linkages between these three advocacy areas. The network offers a forum for feminist advocacy, research, and analysis on global social, political, and economic issues affecting women, with a focus on poor and marginalized women of the global South. This was a shift from the association of feminism with white, middle-class women of the global North common at the time of DAWN’s formation and into the present-day. Rafia Zakaria, author of Against White Feminism: Notes on Disruption, argues that DAWN and its empowerment approach to development offer a successful example of a bottom-up, antiracist alternative to political mobilization that decentres the whiteness prominent in dominant feminist development projects.

Neuma Aguiar was a Brazilian sociologist and one of the women who introduced women's studies in the country. After earning her undergraduate degree at the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro in 1960, she completed a master's degree in sociology and anthropology at Boston University and a PhD at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri. Returning to Brazil, from 1972 to 1996 she worked at the Instituto Universitário de Pesquisas do Rio de Janeiro, the research institute of the Universidade Candido Mendes. From 1978, she taught a women's study course at the institute, which mainly focused on women's impact on the economy. Between 1996 and 2008, she was a full professor at the Federal University of Minas Gerais, both teaching women's studies and directing the Center for Quantitative Research in Social Sciences.