18. Gender and ICTs

- Education, training and skills evelopment
- Industry and Labour
- Content and Language
- Power and Decision Making
- Pornography, trafficking, violence against women, and censorship
- Strategies to incorporate gender considerations into ICT policy-making
- Conclusion

“Women constitute 50 per cent of the population but do 60 per cent of work, earn one-tenth of the income and own 1/100 of the assets”.
http://www.uneca.org/aisi/aisi.htm#gender

The digital divide in access to ICTs, between the developed and developing world, is the result of various factors including poverty, lack of resources, illiteracy and low levels of education. In many societies women are the most impoverished with the least access to resources and with little control over decisions that affect their lives. For this reason, women are on the wrong side of the digital divide, with limited access to and control over ICTs.

When considering the factors that contribute to these inequalities it is important to understand the ways in which ICTs are allocated between women and men (the gendered allocation of ICTs), the different opportunities that exist for men and women with respect to education, training and skills development, employment and working conditions, content development and access to power structures and decision-making processes.

Beyond questions of access to technology and software, training programmes for women should focus on how to find, manage, produce and disseminate information, and how to develop policies and strategies to intervene effectively in and make use of new media. Other major concerns are illiteracy and language as obstacles to information access; the need to break down gender and cultural barriers to women’s access to careers in technology; and the design of software, that often does not respond to the needs of women and girls.

The table reflects the general fact that women do not use the internet as much as men. Despite the fact that there is very little reliable, sex disaggregated data, the numbers suggest that the gender digital divide is related to income and access. In low-income countries women are excluded to a greater extent, but when access improves and becomes widespread, women use the internet as much as men do. When exclusion is widespread, women suffer from it more than men do. We need to understand why this is the case.

Source: Compiled from ITU World Telecommunication Development Report 2002; United Nations The World’s Women 2000: Trends and Statistics; UNDP Human Development Report 2001.‘

All people and groups have the right to access and effectively to use the information and knowledge required in order to address their developmental needs and concerns. This is the strategic starting point for all those concerned with gender equality and social transformation.

Education, training and skills development

Education, training and skill development are critical to ICT interventions. Problems with ICT training for women in the past included the fact that they were often ad-hoc, alienating and not customised to women’s needs. Solutions point to learning practices that should be extended to girls and women, made gender-sensitive (making training women-specific, ensuring ongoing user support, and mentoring in the communities where women live), and deepened (for women as users, technicians, policy and change-makers).

Industry and Labour

In the ICT industry, labour is highly sex-segregated. Women are found in high numbers in the lowest paid and least secure jobs. The gender dimension of ICTs also affects telework, flexi-time, and work from home arrangements, where women have few rights, meagre pay, and no health, social or job security. A woman’s wage-labour outside (or inside) the home as a result of the new technologies does not necessarily entail a change in the family division of labour. Men still get out of doing the housework, and women find themselves with dual or triple burdens. Poor working conditions, long hours and monotonous work routines associated with ICTs are often injurious to women’s health.

In its employment report released in January 2001, the ILO reveals a “digital gender gap”, with women underrepresented in new technology employment in both developed and developing countries. The ILO report also finds that patterns of gender segregation are being reproduced in the information economy.

According to Professor Swasti Mitter of the United Nations University Institute for New Technologies (UNU/ INTECH), who directed a UNIFEM sponsored research project on gender and new technologies, the growth of transnational teleworking has opened up many opportunities for women in the South, including data entry, medical transcription, geographical information systems and software production: “The work of UNU/INTECH in the context of China and Vietnam shows that globalisation has brought new opportunities to young women with familiarity with English in new, service sector jobs, but has made a vast number of over 35-year-olds redundant, either because they are in declining industries, or have outdated skills.”

Content and Language

What content will predominate on the internet and in new media? Who creates it? What is its cultural bias? Are women’s viewpoints, knowledge and interests adequately reflected? How are women portrayed? These are some of the questions that have been raised relating to content, whether in internet spaces, video games or virtual reality.

Women’s viewpoints, knowledge and interests are not adequately represented while gender stereotypes predominate on the internet today. Some of these concerns are an extension of those formulated in relation to sexism and portrayal of women in the media in general. But they also relate to a broader range of issues such as the need for women to systematise and develop their own knowledge and perspectives and make sure they are adequately reflected in these spaces.

The dominance of English language content, often from countries in the North, on the internet, is another major concern raised by women’s organisations. Language barriers to information access require the development of applications such as multilingual tools and databases, interfaces for non-Latin alphabets, graphic interfaces for illiterate women and automatic translation software.

Power and Decision Making

Although women are acceding in ever-greater numbers to jobs and expertise with ICTs, the same is not necessarily true of their access to decision-making processes and control of resources. Whether at the global or national levels, women are under-represented in all ICT decision-making structures, including policy and regulatory institutions, ministries responsible for ICTs, boards and senior management of private ICT companies. One problem is that decision making in ICTs is generally treated as a purely technical area (typically for men experts), where civil society viewpoints are given little or no space, rather than a political domain. Deregulation and privatisation of the telecommunications industry is also making decision making in this sector less and less accountable to citizens and local communities, further compounding the problems experienced by women in gaining access to decision making and control of resources.

Pornography, trafficking, violence against women, and censorship

The picture that emerges from most analyses of new information and communication content is of masculinist rhetoric and a set of representations that are frequently made sexual and often sexist. Pornography, email harassment, ‘flaming’ (abusive or obscene language), and cyberstalking are well documented. It is estimated that 10 percent of sales via the Internet are of a sexual nature, whether in the form of books, video-clips, photographs, on-line interviews, or other items. New technical innovations facilitate the sexual exploitation of women and children because they enable people easily to buy, sell and exchange millions of images and videos of sexual exploitation of women and children.¹
These technologies enable sexual predators to harm or exploit women and children efficiently and, anonymously. As a result of the huge market on the Web for pornography and the competition for audiences among sites, the pornographic images have become rougher, more violent, and increasingly degrading. The affordability of and access to global communications technologies allow more users to carry out these activities in the privacy of their home.²

Even more disturbing is the use of the internet as a tool in the prostitution and trafficking of women. In 1995 an estimated 1.8 million women and girls were victims of illegal trafficking, and the numbers are growing. The internet is used in multiple ways to promote and engage in the sexual exploitation and trafficking of women. Pimps use the internet to advertise prostitution tours to men from industrialised countries. The men then travel to poorer countries to meet and buy girls and women in prostitution. Traffickers recruiting women from the Baltic States use the Web to post advertisements for unlikely jobs in Western Europe (such as waitress or nanny). Information on where and how to find girls and women in prostitution in cities all over the world is posted on commercial Web sites and non-commercial newsgroups.³In response to the growing problem, the Council of Europe in 2001 established a working group to study the impact of new information technologies on trafficking in human beings for the purpose of sexual exploitation

There are numerous organisations working on the issues of women’s trafficking which have done much to impede the use of the internet for trafficking in women and children, and the explosion of pornography on the internet While recognising that traffickers and pornographers have moved their businesses to the internet, women’s organisations have also been aware of the dilemma of calling for government measures to curb this.

One of the fiercest debates in the area of internet rights regards the issue of freedom of expression and censorship. Some organisations have used the presence of pornography on the internet to call for stricter policies for monitoring and censuring content on the internet, including the development of software devices that would track down the creators and consumers of pornographic materials. But child porn on the internet is as illegal as it is offline/outside. There is no need to create special laws for cyberspace. Some women’s organisations have been at the forefront of pointing out the danger of inviting censorship measures that could very easily be extended to other content areas, and limit freedom of expression far beyond the issue of pornography and trafficking.

Legislation can be interpreted widely, leaving it open for states to decide what they would consider “illegal” or “harmful practices.”

The priority is that women should be informed, aware and included in the discussions and debates taking place around this trend, and consulted in the development of any policies and practices that are advocated by state agencies and other bodies involved.

In this spirit, UNESCO is already carrying out a number of research and awareness-raising projects to combat trafficking in women and children in the Asia-Pacific region, and has been collaborating with the Open Society Institute in the creation of the ‘Stop Trafficking’ network in Central and Eastern Europe, as well as in Central Asia. In December 2002, UNESCO also co-hosted an international symposium on the theme of freedom of expression in the information society, where discussion focused on three issues: the new possibilities and limitations offered by cyberspace with regard to freedom of expression; all the obstacles limiting freedom of expression in cyberspace; and the issue of regulation of content in cyberspace. The participants concluded that:
“We must resist the temptation to demonise the Internet. The offences committed on the Internet are not particularly original (apart from attacks by hackers); they reflect behaviours that are specific to social life, and which already found carriers in the traditional media. Thus we need to look at the Internet as a tool for democracy, and not from the angle of its real or potential failings.”⁴

Current initiatives to regulate and control the internet, both in relation to content and use, strike at the heart of the power of new technologies – a system of tools that allows people to communicate with one another, one-to-one, one-to-many, many-to-many, across traditional and entrenched power structures. To threaten this potential, through initiatives which censor, monitor and survey people, movements, actions, information and communication, will severely limit peoples abilities to learn, network and participate in the decision-making processes which govern their lives.

Strategies to incorporate gender considerations into ICT policy-making

The following recommendations relate to strategy and lines of action that will enable women to overcome the many obstacles that they face, and help guarantee them more equitable access to new and emerging communications technologies and electronic information sources.

• Promote the access of women, girls and women’s organisations to new and emerging communications technologies and computerised information resources
• Promote the development of computerised information resources on issues related to the advancement of women
• Support the development of initiatives of women and citizens’ groups in the field of computer networks that promote the advancement of women and gender equality
• Support women and girls’ access to training in using computer networks and promote a gender perspective in training and methodology in the field of new technologies
• Promote equal access of women to advanced technical training and careers in computer communications
• Promote and support the equal participation of women in international and national decision-making relating to use of communications infrastructure and access to computer networks
• Create content that reflects women’s needs and voices
• Facilitate and encourage the involvement of women in technological innovation

Conclusion

As pointed out in the five-year review report of the implementation of the Beijing Platform for Action, traditionally, gender differences and disparities have been ignored in policies and programmes dealing with the development and dissemination of improved technologies. As a result, women have benefited less from, and been disadvantaged more by, technological advances. Women, therefore, need to be actively involved in the definition, design and development of new technologies. Otherwise, the information revolution might bypass women or produce adverse effects on their lives. The outcome of the five-year review recommended that further actions and initiatives have to be explored and implemented to avoid new forms of exclusion and ensure that women and girls have equal access and opportunities in respect of the developments of science and technology.