Technology and the Other 50%: Women and ICT
Today is the 100th anniversary of International Women's Day!
NDI demonstrates its commitment to supporting women in democracy on a daily basis. Roughly 75% of NDI programs have dedicated components on women's political participation. Within NDI, women are represented at the top levels of the organization in DC and in the field, including on a team focusing on mainstreaming women's programming in all of NDI's work.
And hey - there's me! I'm the female on the NDItech team. I don't spend a lot of time thinking about my gender at work; I'm an XX who works with some pretty great XYs, and I'm glad for that. But it is true that I'm outnumbered, three to one - and that women in technology are vastly underrepresented in general. Women make up only about a quarter of the recipients of Computer Science degrees, and are present in the technology workforce in roughly equal proportions. A quick stroll around the corporate campuses of tech giants in Silicon Valley bears out the numbers: just not a lot of ladies out there.
It's fascinating, then, to see how many women work in the field of ICT4D. Anecdotally, it's a field full of women - tough, experienced, dedicated experts working on everything from health to banking. I'm not sure why this is - perhaps because women become interested in development or human rights first, and come to tech second, or maybe ICT4D is seen as more accessible than a sector full of developers with ironic t-shirts of defunct startups. Whatever it is, women are everywhere in the field, and they are influencing the way tech-supported development is practiced. Women working in ICT4D have been the strongest proponents of bridging the 'gender digital divide'; utilising the unique aspects of technology to support women's inclusion.
The research bears out the need. A recent article in Scientific American cites a 2010 report by the GSMA, a mobile network operator standards group, and the Cherie Blair Foundation for Women which examined the disparity of ICT use and access between men and women.
"[The report] "found a 'mobile gender gap' in low- and middle-income countries: women are 21 percent less likely than men to own a mobile phone. The rate is highest in Asia, at 37 percent. Once they get phones women nearly uniformly report feeling safer, more connected and more independent. Nearly half say the phones help increase income and professional opportunities."
Partially in response to this gender digital divide, in 2010 the GSMA launched the 'mWoman' program, supporting both implementers and end-users of mobile supported tech for development and empowerment.* And there are hundreds, if not thousands, of projects that focus on ICTs for empowering women. Mobile have been used to support women's basic literacy eduction in Senegal, through the Tostan Jokko Initiative; for organizing women leaders and community groups in Iraq, to empower midwives in Ghana, and as tools for economic development in India. At the same time, women using ICTs can become targets for gender-based violence; honor killings in India over forbidden marriages arranged by mobile, domestic violence in response to disrupted power balances in Uganda, and targeting women for smart phones in Haitian IDP camps. There remains much work to be done.
When the NDItech team thinks about incorporating information and communications technology into our democracy programming, we often confront the issue of the digital divide. We think about how to take things offline, how to use low-tech tech, how to repurpose digital content for an analog audience. Most of the time, though, the divide we are referring to is economic, geographic, or educational. Today - on a day dedicated to the importance of women, and the continuing struggle for gender parity in all nations of the world - we could all use a small reminder to think about how we can address that digital gender gap, too.
Some fantastic resources on women and ICT:
- GSMA and Cherie Blair Foundation - Women and Mobile: A Global Opportunity (PDF)
- International Center for Research on Women - Bridging the Gender Divide: How Technology Can Advance Women Economically (PDF)
- GSMA: mWomen - Collected Research
*(Just a quick note on the mobile: women do seem to be overrepresented in mobile projects, but I'd argue that is a categorization based end-user interface, and one which doesn't acknowledge that many mobile projects run on sophisticated backends, utilizing the full breadth of ICT tools.)