Are ICTs enabling women’s empowerment?
By +SocialGood Connector Nashilongo Gervasius Nakale
As web-enabled Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) become increasingly central to all aspects of everyday life, integrating women’s perspectives in all aspects from policy to outreach and engagement becomes a major cause for attention.
Sustainable Development Goal 5 calls for gender equality. In subsection B, the goal aims to enhance the use of enabling technology, specifically information and communications technology, to promote the empowerment of women.
Perhaps we should ask; are women locally or even globally empowered through ICTs?
While opportunities for empowerment exists, current challenges remain a stumbling block to achieving true empowerment.
The Violence:
The internet, an ICT component, is used for systematic and widespread discrimination against women and girls. In addition, the internet is increasingly becoming an arena for recurring and interrelated forms of gender-based violence. Online violence is generally symptomized by harassment, bullying, and the unconsented distribution of intimate materials. The latter has become a weapon against women leaving relationships and serves as a public example of an online version of gender-based violence. This violence, highlighted by participants of the Namibia Digital Forum in 2019, has become a reason why women leave online spaces.
The Gender Divide:
The digital gender gap is increasing globally. This is confirmed by 2016 data from the International Telecommunications Union (ITU). Unequal access is furthered by economic factors, including the high-price of many ICT gadgets, the cost of data, digital illiteracy, and the unavailability of the internet in areas deemed unprofitable (such as rural areas and urban peripheries).
To this end, the “digital divide” between women and men largely determines who benefits from and shapes the content, development, and use of ICTs. This reflects existing power relations in society. The online space inherits all dimensions of poverty: lack of resources, opportunities and choice, power and voice, and human security.
True Transformation:
A 2015 survey of the Web Foundation Women’s Rights Online found that nearly every woman surveyed owned or had access to a phone, however the ICT revolution was not yet transforming their lives.
This means ICTs did not alleviate of barriers faced by women and girls. Such barriers include illiteracy, poverty, time scarcity, hindrances of mobility, as well as cultural and religious taboos.
Additionally, ICTs did not significantly increase women's and girls’ visibility and mobility in the public space or strengthen their public and private agency.
To truly transform women's and girls’ lives, ICTs must become a tool to reach groups of women and girls who, for different reasons, are not currently participating in public or social life.
Policy Response:
From a policy perspective, governments globally have a long road ahead to achieve SDG commitments on ensuring equal access to technology by 2030, and consequently to leveraging ICTs to empower women.
ICT policies can and must address growing digital gender inequality in order for women to participate and be heard in the digital revolution. Yet, a majority of countries’ ICT strategies and policies remain gender blind.
As evidence, in 2013 the Broadband Commission’s Working Gender found that a vast majority of National Broadband Plans fail to include gender targets.
The Importance of Data:
Despite opportunities for implementing policies to support women’s rights on the web, there is very little statistically relevant data on women and ICTs. Additionally, none of the major gender equality indices incorporate ICTs.
The importance of aggregated data goes as far as supporting SDG #17, which commits governments to increase the availability of high-quality, timely, and reliable gender-disaggregated data.
As the importance of access to ICTs grows, so too does the need — and urgency — to collect gender-disaggregated data on how women are accessing and using these technologies. Without this data, measuring and achieving meaningful progress will remain impossible.
SDG #5:
The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) provide a historic opportunity to halt and reverse growing digital inequality by turning political commitment into concrete intervention. In SDG 5, measuring access and impact at local levels is the way to go.
If gender dimensions of ICTs are identified and addressed, ICTs can be a powerful catalyst for political, social, and economic empowerment of women, and a tool to promote gender equality and consequently truly affirm that women are equal everywhere.
Nashilongo Gervasius is an ICT Policy Researcher and Consultant. She holds a master’s degree in ICT and the Knowledge Society. She can
