Documenting Gender Apartheid is a Norway-based international oral-history project dedicated to recording and preserving first-hand accounts of gender apartheid as it is lived, enforced, resisted, and justified across the world.
Gender apartheid is not abstract. It is a system of laws, customs, and controls that systematically deny women full participation in public, social, legal, and economic life. It operates in homes, schools, courts, workplaces, and communities — shaping entire lives and societies.
What We Mean by Gender Apartheid
Gender apartheid is a structural form of discrimination in which one gender — almost always women — is reduced to second-class status through organised, persistent restrictions on autonomy, movement, education, work, speech, and bodily freedom.
This project exists to show what that system looks like in practice — not through slogans or statistics, but through lived experience.
What We Are Building
The project aims to collect:
- 500 interviews with women directly targeted by gender apartheid
- 100 interviews with witnesses who have seen it enforced within families, workplaces, and communities
The archive also includes voices that defend or justify gender-apartheid practices — not to legitimise harm, but to document how it is sustained.
How We Work
This is an oral-history project, not a media campaign. Participants control how they are identified, what is shared publicly, and how their testimony is preserved. Interviews are recorded in the participant’s preferred language and archived for long-term research, education, and human-rights work.
The People Behind the Project
The project was initiated by Iranian poet and activist Fatemeh Ekhtesari, who experienced gender apartheid first-hand and was imprisoned as a political prisoner in Iran for her writing on equality.
It is developed in collaboration with Sic Publishing, an independent, Norway-based publishing house committed to freedom of expression and the preservation of marginalised voices.
Why This Matters
Gender apartheid depends on silence, fragmentation, and denial. By creating a permanent archive of voices — survivors, witnesses, and enforcers — this project seeks to make the system visible, understandable, and impossible to ignore.