Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí

Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí listen^ⓘ(born 10 November 1957) is a Nigerian gender scholar and full professor of sociology at Stony Brook University. She acquired her bachelor's degree in political science at the University of Ibadan in Ibadan, Nigeria and went on to pursue her graduate degree in sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. Oyěwùmí is the winner of the African Studies Association's 2021 Distinguished Africanist Award, which recognizes and honours individuals who have contributed a lifetime of outstanding scholarship in African studies combined with service to the Africanist community.

In her contribution to Twenty-five years of Women Writing African Women's and Gendered Worlds, historian Nwando Achebe identifies Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí as one of the Women scholars of West African descent (specifically from Nigeria) whose migration to Europe and North America forms part of the broader "brain drain" phenomenon in African higher education.

In her 1997 monograph, The Invention of Women: Making an African Sense of Western Gender Discourses, she offers a postcolonial feminist critique of Western dominance in African studies. The book won the American Sociological Association's 1998 Distinguished Book Award in the Gender and Sex category.