Heather Gibb

Her current research interests include gender dimensions of intellectual property rights regimes and traditional medicinal knowledge. She is also engaged in research o­n temporary labour migration and is organizing multi-stakeholder roundtables in Jamaica and Barbados o­n Canada’s Seasonal Agricultural Workers Program.

She is Gender Advisor for the APEC Economic Integration Project, a 5-year trade policy capacity building project that targets six economies in Southeast Asia. In 2004, she coordinated the first “gender” project of APEC’s Committee o­n Trade and Investment (CTI), “Supporting Marginalized Women Exporters”. The project involved case studies contributed by partners in 5 APEC economies, an overview and synthesis paper, and a “Dialogue” o­n project findings and recommendations with members of CTI and APEC’s Gender Focal Point Network. The project identified barriers to exporting experienced by very small, “marginalized” women producers and made recommendations for follow-up activities for APEC committees and national governments.

Ms Gibb’s recent publications include Farmworkers from afar: Results from an international study of seasonal farmworkers from Mexico and the Caribbean working o­n o­ntario farms, 2006, “Engendering Labour Mobility Agreements” and “Gender Integration in APEC: A Retrospective”, in Gender and Trade: A Policy Research Dialogue o­n Mainstreaming Gender into Trade Policies, Status of Women Canada, 2006.

In 2003, Ms Gibb was member of The North-South Institute research team with Chantal Blouin, Maire MacAdams and Ann Weston that undertook the study, “Engendering Canadian Trade Policy: A Case Study of Labour Mobility in Trade Agreements”, with support from Status of Women Canada’s Policy Research Fund.

Ms Gibb received her education from McGill University and the University of British Columbia, and is a member of the International Working Group o­n Gender, Macroeconomics and International Economics (GEM-IWG).

September 2006