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Gender and ICT/Preface

The status of women’s access to participation in the Information Society is a microcosm of the larger society that we live in. It is a startling testament of the sheer mountain of the task that is before us and also how optimism at the highest levels of national policy makers has to be tempered with the harsh realities of the socio-economic and political landscape that is evident in the developing world. It is within this crippling environment that the role of ICTs and their potential for the empowerment of women should be examined to be able to provide concrete and tangible results for the participation of women from all levels of society into the Information Society.

There are notable examples of successes within the region in attempting to push this agenda forward, but it should also be cautioned that we need to place these pilot projects and ad hoc policies in the appropriate context. We need to ensure these successes do not detract attention from the actual status of participation of women in the Information Society. In the final analysis, equal participation of women in the Information Society involves attention on issues such as the ability to access, process, create and manage information.

UNDP has always advocated that ICTs have enormous potential, especially in the field of education, health and commerce. Even more so, it has a critical role in providing an opportunity to democratize decision-making and enhance the governance processes of women’s rights. However, to ensure we are able to reap the full potential of the opportunities within this new Information Age, the global community and national policy makers have no other choice but to be proactive about ensuring that the benefits of ICT are equally available to and shaped by women and men.

It is within this vein, that UNDP-APDIP and APC WNSP collaborated on this publication to examine and discuss the context of ICTs and gender by placing it within the Gender Equality Framework.

We hope this publication will move the dialogue forward to address the questions of implications of integrating a gender perspective by realistically examining the state of play across the region.

Shahid Akhtar Programme Coordinator, UNDP-APDIP

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Gender and ICT/Introduction

What are the Benefits of ICT for Development and What is the Digital Divide?
Information and Communications Technology (ICT) has no doubt been recognized as a potent force that can transform the development pace and status of a country. In fact, this is not the first time that technology is seen to provide the much needed impetus for progress and development. Industrialization and the establishment of manufacturing and electronic assembly plants, primarily in Asia, and to a large extent in Latin America, have demonstrated how technology alone could influence and drive economies and their respective developmental policies.

Within the same vein, the developments taking place in the field of ICT have positively enabled and strengthened the creation, processing, storing and sharing of information as a continuous communication cycle. It provides instantaneous relaying of information to and from any location on the face of the planet at a relatively lower cost than ever before. The potential benefits for women with the resources to access and use new ICTs are enormous. For society as a whole, ICTs offer immense possibilities for reducing poverty by providing income generating opportunities, overcoming women’s isolation, giving women a voice, improving governance and advancing gender equality. In addition, ICTs have provided various options to increase the reach and speed of communication (see Box 1).

At a macro level, this seems to imply that geographical, social, economic and political borders and boundaries are made irrelevant in this new information age. However, there is a growing global concern on what is deemed as the ‘digital divide’ – of those who have the capacity and access to information and the ‘information have-nots’.

In addition, it must be noted that the impact of the digital divide on information ‘have-nots’ needs to be contextualized within the reality that women make up the majority of the poor and are part of the deeper end of this divide. The constraints on women’s access, usage and capacity vis-à-vis ICT are similar in many respects regardless of geography. Poverty, illiteracy, lack of education and skills, language limitations and capacity, time constraints, cultural restrictions on mobility in public, and psychological barriers (which are perhaps due to the perception that technology is a male domain) often result in women’s ambivalence and fear towards ICTs.

Why does Gender Equality Remain a Missing Agenda in Development?
Today’s development framework leaves very little room to address issues of equity (which, to a large extent, demands affirmative action towards women’s empowerment) and gender equality. If a gender perspective and analysis is at all integrated, the main impulse motivating the articulation of concerns with gender are usually limited to promoting growth, reducing poverty and improving productivity (Rose, 1995). The additional concerns of Asian countries on the sustainability of the digital economy have further exacerbated this emphasis. As trends in negotiations around the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) have shown, actions which were proposed prioritize issues of infrastructure, connectivity and access (WSIS Plan of Action 2003 ). Gender equality advocacy groups had to continuously monitor negotiations and persistently advocate for gender to be recognized as a cross-cutting issue and principle in the final declaration, only to see it whittle down and tied specifically to a paragraph on women as a target group, and after young people (WSIS Declaration of Principles 2003 ). Such narrow definitions discourage a deeper analysis and engagement into the complexities faced by women and girls in exercising their agency in decision-making that affects all spheres of their lives. Hence, engagement with equity in this respect usually extends only as far as addressing ‘access’, rather than empowerment issues of control, ownership, decision-making and self-determination. A policy study on gender and ICT in the Philippines by WomensHub and the Philippine Legislators Committee on Population and Development (PLCPD) points out that a correlation between the level of human development and the prevalence of ICT access and use exists and that “countries with high human development indices prove to have high ICT availability. Women’s development, as a highlighted concern of human and sustainable development, must therefore be considered in the planning, implementation, and monitoring of ICT development and utilization in the country.”

Why is There a Need to Incorporate Gender in ICT for Development?
In order to maximize the potentials of ICT in effecting gender equality and women’s empowerment, there is a need to not only have a clearer understanding of the concept of gender, but to also consciously integrate a gender perspective in ICT and improve our ability in identifying and analysing gender and ICT issues.

At the outset, while it is acknowledged that most development paradigms do incorporate gender as a factor, it must be noted that these are primarily and largely as an add-on or as an afterthought. It must also be noted that several developmental agencies have now taken a broad-based approach, whereby they have placed gender as a cross-cutting thematic area of developmental work.

Gender advocates have long insisted that gender is an integral component in development for the simple reason that persistent and emerging gender issues and inequalities hinder full and equitable development. A gender-blind framework and approach to development does not take into account socially constructed inequalities between women and men, as well as between different kinds of women and different kinds of men, within a community.

Furthermore, the location of gender in development paradigms and initiatives have been mostly in areas that are viewed traditionally as ‘women’s issues’, such as health, and violence within the community and the family. While these issues of concern are important, it is equally important to extend and expand the development framework to include areas and fields that have not included women and gender in the past. In the Philippines, for instance, the review of the government’s ICT policies that was conducted by WomensHub and PLCPD has shown that: “Significantly missing in the many incarnations of the ICT policy initiatives and formulations as well as ICT legislations in the last 10 years is a clear-cut and equivocal commitment to advance the gender equality and women’s empowerment through ICT. The Philippines’ strategic framework for ICT development is silent on gender issues and considerations.”

ICTs have long been believed to be gender neutral but, contradictorily, the ICT sector is primarily a male domain. This, in and of itself, is an issue as it dismisses the invisibility of women in the ICT field as a given. ICT for development frameworks and initiatives that do not incorporate gender as a key factor and concern run the risk of widening inequalities between women and men. For example, in attempts to provide universal access to ICTs among rural communities, several development agencies fail to consider women’s particular needs and realities in planning and implementation. Thus, these initiatives tend to be largely tailored towards the needs of men within these communities, a situation that further marginalizes women. Policy makers and even development experts may sceptically ask too, why women living in poverty would need computers? (See Box 2).

ICT is an important tool to address women’s basic needs but, more importantly, it also serves as a means for women to lead themselves out of poverty. “Women in poverty may lack education and may be illiterate, but this should not be equated with their lack of wisdom, survival skills or resilience,” stressed Usha Reddi, Director of the Commonwealth Educational Media Centre for Asia. Women must be enabled to use ICT effectively within a social, economic and cultural fabric that has consistently disallowed this. Digbijoy Bhowmik of i4d said, “it must be kept in mind that the need for information and communication precedes the need or substantiation of technology.” In other words, the need for information, knowledge and communication and the means by which these are provided cannot be considered at the same level of priority, as these needs existed long before ICT. ICT must remain as the means to this end.

Application of ICTs by women’s rights activists in small-scale projects has shown that such technologies enable a woman to seek safe spaces in the form of information, knowledge and community. ICTs provide women the ability to make informed choices in relation to political, economical or social issues that affect their lives. If a gender perspective and analysis is not integrated from the beginning into national ICT policies while nations are either still trying to develop these or have yet to start, women and girls risk experiencing disempowering gender relations of a greater intensity and being impoverished even further.

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Gender and ICT/Taking a Closer Look at Women's Realities

Gender Neutrality of Technology – Pure Science Fiction
The application of the technology and who uses it make ICT extremely gendered. However, in reality, gender issues are not holistically addressed in the application of ICT. The way ICT is applied today has largely been an extension of our socialization – an extension of the provision of basic services and an extension of our efforts to promote efficiency, productivity and cost-effectiveness. Generally, the way ICT is applied today has little to do with the appreciation of the individual and the richness in diversity s/he brings to a society and the multiple identities and roles that the individual plays within that society.

The way ICT is applied today makes little difference in addressing gender (Kuga Thas, 2003). Traditionally, women have had a subordinate position to men, where, for example, she may contribute materially to the household but her husband makes the decisions on how the income is spent. On a macro-political level, most governing bodies are dominated by men; legislative and judicial decisions often lack a gendered perspective and do not represent women’s interests. ICT access and use may be similarly restricted: at the micro-level, the son’s preferences may translate into allowing boys greater access than their sisters to the family computer; at the macro-level, supposedly ‘gender-neutral’ ICT policies regarding education, training and price structure may have an unintended negative impact based on gender roles and access to ICT resources.

In the context of ICT, it is necessary to consider how ICT impact women’s multiple roles and examine changes brought about by the new information and communication society on women’s and men’s gendered roles. Gender role analysis is useful to understanding to what ends women and men utilize ICT (i.e. reproductive tasks associated with educating children, productive tasks associated with work, and community tasks associated with volunteerism), whether use of ICT is time-saving, and whether women’s and men’s use of time is different (i.e. does one sex have greater leisure or does increased time flexibility create the potential for more ‘double shift’ as telecommuting blurs distinctions between private (home) and public (work) domains).

In terms of ICT use and impacts, examining gender roles may lead to greater understanding of the differences between women and men in ICT use and impacts. For example:
 * In a given community, do women and men, girls and boys, participate equally in the use of Internet facilities at a library or telecentre? At the telecentres, are men visiting pornographic sites and making the environment uneasy for women to remain within?
 * In a development organization, is there a gender difference among those who use/appropriate email and those who do not? Is a general public email account assigned to lower category staff who are usually women compared to private email accounts of top management who are usually men?
 * Does the availability of a home computer facilitate work management through telecommuting, or does it create unrealistic time demands because the worker – female or male – is always connected? Are both women and men who telecommute paid equal wages for equal work or do wage differentials still exist?
 * Are women, when telecommuting, often disrupted just because they are working at home, while men are generally left to do their work without disruption just as they would be at an office? Do female workers’ time demands increase or decrease?
 * Are national policies being designed in such a manner to encourage telecommuting only for women, with the presumption that all women would prefer to work from home as they would want to take care of the children and household? Do such policies work against encouraging men to share household responsibilities? Do such national policies prioritize incentives to the private sector as they will not have to pay for various insurance and health benefits?

Will such policies effectively remove women’s opportunities to go outside of the home? Will such policies unknowingly exacerbate existing situations of domestic violence?

The questions above as one can see are not just limited to the issue of an equal number of women and men using ICTs. They must include issues that ‘interfere’ with not only family matters, but cultural matters as well. Projects that say they address gender inequalities therefore, need to look beyond the surface of the immediate problem (see Figure 1). Projects cannot run away from ‘interfering with family and cultural matters’ because when gender inequalities are addressed, the whole issue of socialization of values, of what is feminine and masculine, and the power dynamics between the two socialized concepts need to be examined and analysed.

The fact remains that opportunity costs of forgoing girls’ labour are often high, particularly relative to boys’, given the gender division of labour within the household. Girls are more likely to be ‘employed’ in the household, whereas boys are often not considered old enough to contribute to productive labour (Bhatty, 1998). Thus, the opportunity costs of empowering women and girls at all stages are high for a household to bear. It is only when this ‘empowerment’ is accompanied with an income value to the household that a valuation of their contributions changes to one of reasonable acknowledgement. Gender is therefore a consistent variable in decision-making at the household, and reinforced in a vicious circle by the larger society not only through tradition, beliefs and practices, but through various institutional structures and mechanisms which include those of the State. These usually result in women and girls facing gender-specific disadvantages arising from the specific construction of femininity.

Women are also constantly reminded about what they should or should not be interested in, and where their capabilities and strengths lie. For example, the Newsweek magazine, regularly trumpets studies finding gender-related mental differences while ignoring the (far more common) studies which finds no differences at all (Henson, 2002). Dismissive explanations such as ‘women just aren’t interested in computers’ or ‘women aren’t as smart as men’, implicitly reinforce the stereotypical mentality that women are genetically pre-determined from conception to not be interested in computers. This ‘just aren’t’ theory has been used in many other fields when women first began entering them, from education to medical science to even joining the armed forces. Even if women are able to acquire better education and training and begin to enter ICT fields in greater numbers, women’s leverage within the ICT job market may be undercut by the feminization of certain ICT occupations whereby “large numbers of women enter a profession and as a result, there is a drop in salaries, status and working conditions” (Hersh, 2000). As Reardon warns, “as computer-based skills become more commonplace, and as the need for more workers to use them in a greater variety of ways grows, more women will again be recruited. But this will be at a lower wage because these will no longer be considered specialist skills, merely something that women can do” (Reardon, 1998). Feminization has plagued other sectors, perhaps with the exception of law and medicine, and Hersh raises the question of how engineering and ICT professions can be opened up to women and “become a genuinely gender neutral profession without a resulting drop in salaries and status” (Hersh, 2000).

A cornerstone of gender equality is women’s equal participation in decision-making. Collective participation is also one of the essential aspects of women’s empowerment. Participation in decision making is integrated with ‘conscientization’, process of awareness raising among women about gender discrimination and the resulting oppression it creates for women as a social group. Through this process, women collectively analyse various aspects of gender inequality that they face. This process constitutes women’s development and becomes the basis for action to overcome and dismantle gender inequality in control of resources. Achieving control is an essential element of women’s empowerment that includes the ability to direct and/or influence events to protect one’s own interests. Control makes it possible for women to ensure that resources as well as the benefits that the use of these resources can bring are distributed so that women and men get equal shares. This framework is particularly useful in understanding and evaluating the impact of women’s access to ICTs. Gender gaps in access to ICT resources and services remain an obstacle to women’s empowerment (see Box 3).

In investigating the impact of ICT and development on gender equality, it is essential to trace the factors that govern its production, consumption, distribution and appropriation. Women and men traditionally have different levels of access to and control over resources, whether they exist in the private or public spheres.

Where are Women in the Globalized Information and Communication Society?
In a globalized world where international trade and financial systems have become so dependent on ICTs, it has become an arena that women cannot afford to not be a part of. Despite being a very new field in most developing countries, the ICT sector is already being entrenched with gender inequities that are so well-ingrained in other sectors, from gender employment patterns and gender stereotyped division of labour to gender role biases. These could take the form of preference for male workers because of the perceived physical demands of the job or the perceived higher level of skills and experiences which are in turn due to men having easier access to more opportunities, or the provision for differentials in salaries due to the man being perceived as the main breadwinner of the household. Women tend to be poorly represented as administrators and managers and concentrate in lower level, end user positions. On a higher level of skills, women tend to be well represented in desktop publishing and software programming, but not in hardware design, operating systems or computer maintenance. Swasti Mitter says that, “technological innovations become commercially successful if and when the creator of the innovation could make use of political, economic and legal networks. Thus the dominant group in a society determines the shape and direction of a society’s techno-economic order - and the image of an inventor has almost always been male. Lack of access to relevant networks in the public domain explains the historical marginalization of women’s contribution to technological innovations” (Sarkar, 2003). Unfortunately, it is a reality that women are not seen or encouraged to be ‘creators’ but rather more as ‘consumers’ of ICTs.

Access to ICT, Women’s Use and Challenges
Nancy Hafkin and Nancy Taggart (2001) in their document entitled Gender, Information Technology, and Developing Countries: An Analytic Study provides valuable insights as to where women are in the still defining globalized information and communication society. In their review of available sex-disaggregated statistics/data on Internet use, which had to be sourced from marketing surveys and ad hoc research projects, the authors found the figures by country puzzling as there did not appear to be any correlation between women’s Internet usage and expected indicators such as female literacy rate, female GDP per capita, female representation in professional and technical jobs, or even gender empowerment. Nor were there regional patterns to women’s use. No correlation could be found in developing countries either between a high percentage of users overall and a high percentage of women users, as there is in the developed world such as in the USA and Japan (Hafkin and Taggart, 2001). This lack of correlation supports the hypothesis that many women Internet users in almost all developing countries are not representative of women in the country as a whole, but rather are part of a small, urban educated elite. A study by Asian Women’s Resource Exchange (AWORC) on gender and ICT issues in the Asia-Pacific confirms this (Ramilo and Villanueva, 2001). Figures of relatively high (e.g. 30 percent or more) women’s Internet use as a percentage of total users per country can be misleading when Internet access is confined to a tiny elite of high-income urban dwellers. This urban elite centricity is particularly true for countries like the Philippines and Malaysia, where the latter boasts of extremely good telecommunication infrastructure. Figures by the Internet World Stats show that Asian Internet users as at the end of June 2006 experienced a growth of over 232 percent and represent 36.5 percent of global users, but penetration (percentage of global population) is only 10.4 percent (see Table 1). By regions, in 2004, women were 22 percent of all Internet users in Asia, 38 percent in Latin America, and 6 percent in the Middle East. No regional figures by sex were available in Africa. In the two latter regions, less than one percent of the total population was connected to the Internet.

Unfortunately, there are no comprehensive surveys that document all the uses women make of ICT in developing countries. However, the early adapters of the technology in developing countries were nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) working on women’s rights and empowerment issues on behalf of women. This was clearly the case when women mobilized around the world in preparation for and in their actual participation at the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing in 1995. In these cases and in the cases of women entrepreneurs in small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), women are using ICTs to make their organizations and businesses more efficient and effective. Where these groups of women are concerned, women have strived to be their own agents of change and decision-making, ensuring that the technology serves them.

However, while the AWORC study acknowledges that the rate of increase in the use of ICTs by women’s organizations have been rapid, women’s full access to the benefits of ICTs have largely been for administrative purposes (Ramilo and Villanueva, 2001). These findings seem to imply that women’s use of ICTs is driven by their practical realities and needs, which may or may not directly challenge gender inequalities and/or inequities within the local context. The experience of Projek Ikhtiar, however, does suggest that while women are driven by their practical realities and needs, they will be unable to fulfill these needs effectively if gender issues on control and decision-making remain unaddressed.

Another prominent challenge is the lack of relevant local content and the continued predominant use of English, which makes ICT seem highly irrelevant to many women in the Asia-Pacific region, and much of the developing world. Women continue to be more inclined towards ICTs that are more audio in nature, such as the radio and even the mobile telephone. For example, recognizing the relevance of radio and its proliferation as a reality in most women’s lives, especially those who are not employed outside of the homes, the Women’s Aid Organization (WAO) in Malaysia focused its public education strategy on providing awareness and information on basic rights to women, through the radio. WAO targets non-Malay or non-English speaking audiences whom, through experience at the WAO Refuge, were either short of time or had costs and literacy obstacles in gaining information through print media, television or new forms of ICT. Working through the radio has been very successful as the number of phone calls to the Refuge invariably increases whenever there is a programme aired (Kee, 2004). Hence, community media centres which promote women’s issues and content can be an effective approach to providing development solutions but within a gender equality framework.

Mainstream media can also be encouraged to host gender transformative and women-centered programmes. Women prefer technology that is audio in nature not purely because they are illiterate or semi-literate, but largely because they do not speak English, the predominant language of the Internet and the new knowledge-based economy. A cheaper alternative in telephony that is now available is VoIP, which unfortunately is not allowed in many countries because it affects the profits of telecommunication monopolies (Sprigman and Lurie, 2004).

While ICTs include a variety of technologies, the Internet has proved the most innovative and fastestgrowing new technology. This network of networks has become critically important in the development of the new information and/or knowledge society, contributing to the development of what many are now calling the new knowledge-based global economy. Many of the more traditional ICTs such as radio and television broadcasting are converging on the Internet, using it, becoming part of it, and often becoming indistinguishable from it (APC, 2003). In our race to be part of the new knowledge-based economy, it is imperative that governments substantially consider that in many cultures, women have been at the core in safeguarding and passing on traditional knowledge and wisdom. While the recording of this traditional knowledge and wisdom is still done with the use of speech, drama, painting, song or dance, the use of writing and the invention of the printing press has changed information and communication means tremendously.

The knowledge, culture and tacit skills of women should be respected and enhanced through the use of ICTs, thereby enabling a better preservation and transference of traditional knowledge, wisdom and skills. It is also equally important to ensure that the tacit and uncodified knowledge of women, and the material resources of their traditional use in the household and in micro and small businesses, are not appropriated by the corporate sector in the developed world. Codification and digitization of women’s knowledge should not lead to patenting, a trend that could deprive rural and semi-literate women of their livelihoods and ways of life. Instead of an intellectual property regime that privatizes knowledge, an inclusive knowledge society must fully embrace women’s knowledge including knowledge that is contextual, rooted in experience and practice, and draws from local knowledge. In addition, it means ensuring that the information needed by specific communities is generated, and that accessing society’s knowledge is possible and affordable to all.

Trends in the ICT Sector and Gender Implications
The perception of women being passive consumers of ICT rather than producers extends to their work related use as well, where one continues to see a feminization of lower level ICT jobs and women in a more reactive role of receivers of ICT-type jobs. Women continue to be concentrated in tedious, repetitive tasks as when they were during the first wave of industrialization, in manufacturing sectors such as textiles, clothing and electronics. The lower skilled ICT jobs that women typically find themselves in are word-processing and data entry. Trends and dynamics of global job distribution have also seen women taking up more social-related ICT jobs such as working in particular divisions of the call centres industries, information-processing, banking, insurance, finance, printing and publishing, where skilled requirements are relatively lower than in software development. The entry of women in the new technology service sector is not only recent, but there are fewer jobs numerically compared to those that had been created in manufacturing.

Women’s employability status has also considerably weakened as women who had lost manufacturing jobs were generally not qualified and unskilled to enter into the new service industry. The service jobs show a preference for young women, familiar with English, single and better-educated than those who had worked in manufacturing. In call centres in the Philippines, employees – both women and men – commonly recount that they are trained to speak in an American accent, and are even expected to handle emergency calls which get redirected to these call centres outside of the country concerned (interviews conducted by WomensHub, Philippines).

Women tend to represent a very small percentage of managerial maintenance, software developers, or design personnel in operating systems and networks. Summarizing the results of the United Nations University / Institute for New Technologies project on Monitoring the Impact of Technological Changes in Women’s Employment in Asia, Swasti Mitter (in Ng and Kua, 1995) concludes that the introduction of new technologies has changed women’s work in three ways by:

 * 1) Altering the process of production in manufacturing and service industries through automation, de-skilling of workers and augmenting the skills requirements of key jobs;
 * 2) Introducing new products or services in the market, such as electronics, computer peripherals or information processing work; and
 * 3) Shifting production that often used old technologies to locations that are distant from the main sites of commercial units or to home-based workers.

Evidence also indicates that women are conspicuously absent from decision-making structures in ICT in developing countries. These structures include boards and senior management of private IT companies, senior management and advisors of international policy and regulatory organizations, technical standards-setting organizations and industry, and professional organizations. In line ministries of developing countries, out of 201 senior government officials responsible for ICTs in developing countries, only 11 are women (5.5 percent). Although the numbers are miniscule, it is notable that there are more women in senior government positions related to IT in Africa than in other regions. Women’s representation is also very low in International Trade Union Study Groups, which are able to influence the direction of the development of information and communication infrastructure and standards in developing countries. Likewise, women from developing countries are absent among the 19 directors who sit on the board of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), the non-profit corporation that assumes responsibility for Internet address space allocation and related matters, and is therefore a major decision-making body and player in the Internet world. Women in key decision-making positions in ICT have the potential to influence how ICT is allocated, applied and developed in their countries as well as at regional and international levels. These women are able to facilitate the entry of other women into the arena and alleviate some negative impacts of the technology on women and girls.

Despite the appalling statistical scenario of women and ICT use, and its ‘easy-to-miss’ implications on women’s employability, women have taken on leadership roles in technology, debunking the ‘women just aren’t’ argument, of women not being technically inclined (see Box 4). It is important that this information is shared with a wider audience of women and girls to help reverse the mentality and attitude women generally have towards technology as a result of years of socialization that says ‘technology is a male domain’. As Swasti Mitter expressed in her keynote address at the Global Knowledge II Women’s Forum in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia in 2000, “it is not only in the production of content, but also in the sphere of production of technology that women’s presence is necessary for an efficient and equitable knowledge society…The prospect of addressing women-specific questions in the configuration of software remains remote unless women themselves become visible in the community” (Mitter, 2000).

Gender Implications in Skills and Capacity Development in Science and Technology
To some extent, the traditional view that women tend to shy away from technology is becoming less of a reality as women represent more than 30 percent of university level students in natural sciences in a large number of developing countries across the regions (Hafkin and Taggart, 2001). In Malaysia, for example, women are at least 50 percent of the students in IT courses at public universities (Ng and Yong, 1995). In Western Asia, enrollment at most universities is predominantly female. The high percentage of women studying natural sciences, as well as other fields is largely due to the fact that many men are sent or get to study abroad, while women usually do not have this option.

However, these percentages take a sharp dip when a closer examination of the existing workforce in the area of science and technology, and particularly at jobs that require higher levels of ICT skills. Many of these qualified women opt out due to gender-constructed social obstacles – such as tight labour market and the prevailing preference to give men jobs rather than women, lack of suitable mentors and role models, sexual harassment in the field, and so forth (Henson, 2002). Social expectations for women to get married and stay at home is also a prevalent reason, and the ‘value’ of the woman as a wife can be strongly linked to the level of education obtained.

On the flip side of this coin, it is important to note that a growing number of governments who are experiencing this phenomenon of having more women studying at the tertiary level and doing much better than their male colleagues, are thinking of affirmative measures to allow young men to qualify more easily into universities and to encourage better performance by male enrolees. In this respect, governments may want to not just examine the numbers, but also ask why young men are not doing well or studying as hard as they could. If parents are still giving preference to male child education but this time, sending them abroad despite their poorer examination results, it could account for the poor performance locally in schools and at university. In short, is this the result of the fact that there is no change in how young men and boys are being socialized into society and their perception of what it is to be male, while there is some change in how young women and girls are being socialized into society, and in their perception of what it is to be female? Will our response be to withdraw or reduce the affirmative measures taken in relation to development initiatives for women and girls and start reallocating resources towards affirmative measures for young men and boys? Something to ponder about, no doubt.


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Gender and ICT/Placing Women's Empowerment Back Into the Gender Equality Framework

The Odd Couple: Development and Empowerment
Empowerment refers to enabling people towards self-determination. For women, empowerment emphasizes the importance of increasing their power and taking control over decisions and issues that shape their lives. This includes having full access to complete information and to self-discern the quality and credibility of such information in making these decisions. To empower women means to understand and address the various dynamics of power and relationships in a particular society which are intertwined with issues of age, class, culture, ethnicity, gender, history and race.

Power is identified with equity and equality for women and men in access to resources, participation in decision-making and control over distribution of resources and benefits. Gender equality is addressed at these different levels with the aim of increasing equality between women and men, and achieving women’s empowerment. Access to resources refers to both the means and the right to obtain services, products or commodities. Gender gaps in access to resources and services are a major obstacle to women’s development. The process of empowerment includes mobilizing women to eliminate these gaps.

Therefore, if development efforts are indeed being implemented within the framework of gender equality, it means that development interventions must ultimately be aimed to empower women.

Needs vs. Rights Mentality
Many countries argue that development and the needs of the community must come first, rather than providing a preferential focus on women’s development needs and their rights. And often, what are cited are values that put the community first. Hence communal rights must come first before individual rights, making many countries reluctant to place any priority on promoting and protecting women’s rights and autonomy. What many countries have failed to acknowledge, but is open knowledge to everyone, is the fact that communal rights, once gained, are enjoyed at the individual level. The extent to which these are enjoyed by the wider community depends further on the power hierarchies within that community. This ebb and flow of development priorities and choices, however, have yet to fully integrate a gender perspective that is aimed towards the achievement of women’s empowerment. Louise Chamberlain in her paper on ‘Considerations for Gender Advocacy vis-à-vis ICT Policy Strategy’ suggests that gender advocates need to take a more pragmatic approach, i.e. in her words, the ‘business case’ approach (Chamberlain, 2002). Chamberlain maintains that gender mainstreaming is revolutionary in many circles and hence, takes too long to attain if a purely rights-based model is used. While she still promotes using arguments of rights, she strongly suggests complementing these with arguments of essential utility. This is not the first time that gender advocates are asked to ‘speak the language’ of policy makers. Such has been what women’s health rights activists have had to do in showing governments that it costs more to ‘heal’ a woman survivor of rape compared to ensuring that proper laws are in place and duly enforced (see Box 5).

However, the pragmatic cost-benefit approach places the burden of responsibility and proof on gender advocates who are not only under-resourced, but do not have access to suitable sex-disaggregated data. Would it be sufficient for gender advocates to point to examples within other sectors such as health and rural development, which have a longer history of data collection and research, in order to exemplify why gender mainstreaming is important? Would ICT policy makers take any interest if these are not examples pertaining directly to ICT? The fact that gender is cross-cutting should render these examples relevant as any other, yet they are not. Time and again, gender advocates have had to argue as to why gender is important within each and every forum. Governments do have their obligations and responsibilities which they continuously reaffirm of their own free will at various UN conventions and reviews which they are committed or obligated to implement. A more pragmatic approach then may be to design an effective mechanism that will facilitate the various government agencies to actually talk to each other and work together with the national women’s machineries. At the least, there must be a mechanism that comprehensively informs all government ministries of the various commitments made at such fora and how these intersect across sectors as well as their implications for policy-making and implementation. However, one unspoken yet often hinted at hurdle may still remain. There is a general innate fear that remains little spoken of or discussed constructively today, that is, if one promotes women’s rights and women’s empowerment too strongly, then that person is deemed a feminist and a man-hater. The fear of feminism probably manifests in different ways. One of which, usually, is in the way most policy makers and development programme planners would differentiate gender issues from women’s issues, and render ‘achievement of equality’ in terms of equal numbers between the sexes and, in doing so, fail to pay due attention to affirmative measures that need to be undertaken to ensure women’s empowerment. It is time to place women’s empowerment back into the framework of gender equality, where it has always belonged, the way on-the-ground activists have been doing on a smaller scale.

Enabling Women’s Empowerment through ICT
A number of successful initiatives can be cited from all across Asia that demonstrates how women can acquire ICT-related skills and use the technology, and at the same time have control over their use. In this section, efforts have been made to highlight key initiatives that clearly depict how women can be empowered economically, socially and politically. Considering how women’s needs and issues are so interrelated to one another across these three areas, it is not surprising that these initiatives more often than not address more than one area of women’s empowerment.

Enabling Women’s Economic Empowerment
In Asia, a number of credible models exist that could be replicated to address women’s economic issues through the use of ICTs.

The Self Employed Women’s Association (SEWA), for example, has been organizing women in the informal sector in India since 1972. It was one of the first organizations globally to realize the potential of using ICTs for the productive growth of the informal sector. SEWA is establishing Technology Information Centres in 11 districts of Gujarat, India to provide computer awareness training and basic computer skills for their ‘barefoot managers’, build the capacity of women organizers and leaders, and strengthen their members’ micro enterprises. It now runs programmes that develop women’s abilities in the use of computers, radio, television, video, the telephone, fax machines, mobile phones and satellite communication. Electronic networking is expected to strengthen the connections between the various cooperatives working in different sectors and areas, and currently enables the provision of content tailored to the needs and environment of particular groups of villages. In addition, members of SEWA are able to access government schemes and tap into new markets. In the second phase, the centres will also support the education of girls.

The best known of the ICT-enabled businesses with a high percentage of women owners/operators is Grameen Phones in Bangladesh. The Grameen Bank took a focused approach to gender and development through their model of poverty reduction, serving as a source of micro-credit and literacy training, skills development, and health, family planning, and political consciousness education directed at women.

In 1996, the Bank set up Grameen Phones, Bangladesh’s first cell phone network. Grameen Phones is particularly noteworthy because of the economic empowerment that it has brought to poor, largely uneducated women. From among its more than two million predominantly women borrowers, the Bank management selects Village Phone Operators to whom the phone is provided as an in-kind loan. The operators resell wireless phone services (incoming and outgoing) to fellow villagers.

Some 75 percent of the operators are women, numbering about 2,000 (see Box 6). Having women operators promotes women’s phone usage because women are more likely to use phones when the operator is a woman. Where women were operators, 82 percent of the users were women; with men operators, women comprised only 6.3 percent of Grameen Bank phone users.

More than half of women users (58 percent) said that they preferred women phone operators. The phones are used primarily for calls relating to financial matters, particularly relating to remittances, which are a significant source of village income. Strikingly, among poor villagers, 38 percent of phone users had one or more family members living abroad. The phones are also used to obtain agricultural price information, thereby improving the position of the villagers in bargaining with middlemen and resulting in higher prices for local farm products.

Governments too have undertaken some initiatives in building up the capacity of women in the area of ICT, in particular the Korean and Malaysian governments. For example, between 2001 and 2002, the Ministry of Information and Communication of the Republic of Korea, trained one million housewives in computer and Internet use. The Ministry of Labour runs computer training for unemployed women, especially those who are heads of households. The Ministry of Education and Human Resource Development has a project to enhance ICT skills of girl students from elementary through high school. The Ministry of Gender Equality has organized programmes at 12 Korean universities for women who want to work in an e-business or to start Small Office-Home Office businesses. Asian Pacific Women’s Information Network Center (APWINC) at Sookmyung University trains women to work in IT, including as freelancers and in their own businesses.

The Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry encourages the use of ICTs by women farmers through onsite and mobile computer education and technical support services. Real-time information on market prices is posted on the website. The website also operates a shopping mall for agricultural products. Technical assistance is available to farmers in building personal websites. The Kyonggi Province Programme for women IT professionals (http://www.womenspro.org) provides training and lifelong education for women tailored to the different stages of women’s lives. Unemployed women, women heads of households and handicapped women who want to enter the work force are trained in business incubation and capacity building (including gender training). Women are trained for 10 to 12 months as IT specialists, and at the end of it, they either seek employment or start their own businesses. The course made numerous accommodations to meet women’s needs and daily schedules.

In Malaysia, the Demonstrator Application Grant Scheme (DAGS) proved to be an extremely successful model that promoted collaborations and project-based partnerships among governmental agencies, small ICT private sector enterprises, CSOs, as well as the community (see Box 7). Among the 74 projects funded, a number were aimed to benefit women, and included women’s capacity building in the use of ICTs. For example, the project called T-Center For Teleworking and Telecommuting was designed to guide 200 participants, mainly women and youths, to learn and acquire teleworking skills and to enable them to adapt teleworking as a new mode of work. Another project that was funded under the DAGS scheme is the e-Homemakers’ Project (http://ehomemakers.net), the only tri-lingual local portal that promotes the concept of working from home by providing resources and a platform for homemakers and homeworkers to teletrade and tele-exchange. A Women’s Electronic Networking Training (WENT) Award winner in 2003, this project provides basic ICT skills training to disadvantaged and special women to enable them to participate effectively in this knowledge-based economy. The project prepares them to work at home through other soft skills trainings and empowerment exercises.

The examples above bring out the following key elements:

countries, trade is generally a male domain as well, and businesses can succeed or fail by whom you know and do business with. Hence, women will not only lack business management skills but also business development/marketing skills and a business network. Women should either be supported (mentored but not made reliant) with the necessary expertise by a third party or be trained specifically on these skills. For almost all of the examples above, women who are enabled to run small businesses are almost always provided a ‘captured market’ of peers and fellow villagers/community members, a small but still necessary start-up niche. what she has to do given her situation, capacity and needs. What Grameen spearheaded was a development approach that placed resources into the hands of poor women and empowered them with control and decision-making over the use of these. In setting up their system of accountability among their borrowers, Grameen successfully challenged certain cultural norms and entrenched gender-power dynamics.
 * Women are culturally not exposed to establishing and running a business. In fact, in most
 * Grameen’s approach, on the other hand, operates on the notion that the woman knows best on

Enabling Women’s Social Empowerment
Women’s social disempowerment is often strongly linked to her isolation from information that she needs, and this includes her ability, opportunity and space (both virtual and non-virtual) to communicate in her own local language with others for this information.

In India, Change Initiatives is putting a web-based information system to strategic use for the benefit of poor women of Baduria, a rural region in North-24 Parganas district in the Indian state of West Bengal.

The project, Nabanna, is a collaboration exercise among Change Initiatives, United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), National Informatics Centre, researchers of the London School of Economics and Queensland University of Technology, and the Baduria Municipality.

In 2002, concerned over the lack of penetration of ICTs among the rural poor, Change Initiatives found that absence of information and an information-sharing mechanism among poor women have thwarted their ability to fulfil basic needs, restricted their awareness and blocked their desire to break barriers that limit their participation in society. The findings were the result of a survey among woman NGOs and self help groups (SHGs) in rural regions of North-24 Parganas.

As a pilot for the project, Change Initiatives decided to work among poor women of the Baduria Municipality – despite being an urban body, the municipality was to all intents and purposes a rural region – who were involved in its Community Development Scheme. In its application for the inaugural Gender and ICT Awards, Change Initiatives shared that, “since Nabanna involves and affects many people, we had to understand many viewpoints in order to formulate plans and track progress. A key feature that distinguishes our project is that it involves people in all four stages of planning, doing, observing and reflecting.”

For Nabanna, Change Initiatives had developed a novel participatory rural appraisal tool where they had asked the candidates to maintain diaries on their lives. The diaries were an effective tool for needs assessment, in addition to being a vehicle for self-expression. Change Initiatives further shared that, “our biggest achievement until now is in instilling a sense of personal empowerment among the beneficiaries by just ensuring greater access to and use of ICTs. We find that our beneficiaries can raise their voice within their family; are respected by their husband, in-laws, parents and other family members; are considered knowledgeable persons in their community (since they learn computers); and have become more creative after learning graphic art software programmes. Many of them said that by learning computers, they would be able to approach the job market with greater confidence. Over and above this, is the emergence of solidarity that has resulted through the correct perception of the ICT centres being spaces reserved exclusively for women. While learning computers, our beneficiaries often discuss their problems, creating a sense of unity among them and also bringing forth the leadership qualities in them. Solidarity outcomes have also been noticed in our review of information group meetings.” WENT is one key regional training in the Asia-Pacific region that surprised both project owners and donors. Started in 1999 as a project-based initiative, this regional training continued to be jointly managed by the APC WNSP and APWINC on behalf of AWORC until 2004. WENT began by training women on basic website development tools and other Internet-based group communications in 1999. WENT sought to promote greater networking among women’s organizations in the region and enhance their capabilities on the use of ICTs to advance their social and policy advocacy.

The first WENT workshop trained 23 women from 11 countries to use email and web-based services to promote and enhance their participation in the review process for the Beijing Platform for Action. In response to various information and communication needs of women in the Asia-Pacific region, WENT then diversified its training. Since 2000, WENT ran parallel instructional tracks on web-based information management, local area networking, using ICT for advocacy, and database management. In 2004, instructional tracks focused on e-commerce, content development, and training for ICT trainers. From a workshop designed for women’s organizations in the Asian region by women ICT practitioners, WENT has opened its doors to women and their organizations in the Asia-Pacific region. Women coming from relatively under-represented countries such as Bangladesh, Cambodia, East Timor, Kyrgyzstan, Lao PDR, Russia and Uzbekistan have also graduated from WENT. By 2003, 138 women from 23 countries had been trained under WENT’s methodology. Since then, WENT has been successfully replicated in Africa and nationally in the Republic of Korea (1999), the Philippines (2002), Malaysia (2002) and India (2003).

WENT is now being planned for the Pacific and the Middle East and North Africa region. The above examples tell us that in enabling women’s social empowerment, access to ICTs alone is insufficient. Content must match women’s needs in order for ICTs to remain relevant in women’s lives. As needs change, so must content. With WENT, year after year, content evolved to match women’s capacity building needs as women in the region gained more opportunities and exposure in using ICTs. What Change Initiatives and WENT did was to provide ‘safe spaces’ of communication and exchange that forged women’s solidarity within these spaces. As a result, women strengthened each other in their learning and sharing, knowing that they are no longer alone, no longer isolated. There is an additional dimension to the notion of communication as women’s communication rights is a difficult issue to address purely by ensuring physical availability of ICTs. Access to ICTs alone does not take into account who controls these resources. If women need permission from their husbands on exactly when they can turn on/use the radio and the types of radio programmes they can listen to, having a radio in the household as an indicator of success is extremely misleading. Likewise, the establishment of community telecentres alone is insufficient to assume that these will impact and serve women and men equally. Women’s heavy workloads and multiple roles that limit their available time to use the telecentre; male attitudes towards women’s use of technology and to women who visit a mixedsex public facility; the lower educational levels of women compared to those of men, and therefore their lack of literacy skills; the lack of relevant content for women in their local languages; and their lack of disposable income for fee-paying centres, are all gender-based factors that constrain women’s use of the telecentres. Availability is not equivalent to access and access is certainly not equivalent to control and decision-making.

Enabling Women’s Political Empowerment
ICTs have been applied as agents of change in enabling women to participate directly in politics and civic life. The important role provided by ICTs enables an increased opportunity for positive facilitation of public and political participations and rightfully serves as an attempt to replace the traditional form of governance and its accompanying deficiencies with a modern, more open, transparent and responsive service delivery system. As Vikas Nath says, “the new models of governance open up avenues for direct participation of women which so far has been limited to representative forms of participation in which women were insufficiently represented. These models would lead to a more interactive and proactive form of communicating with officials in the local governance spheres in a process which will lead to greater transparency and accountability of their actions. The notion of distance and time would become meaningless as the technologies have the capability of working at all times and from all geographical locations. It also means that women in rural areas for whom time is a scarce commodity and for whom it is absolutely impossible to commute to public offices – the new technologies would enable them to leapfrog to an altogether different platform where they can voice their opinions and communicate to the concerned person without additional burden on their time or commuting large distances.”

In India, SEWA organizes electronic discussions through the panchayati raj (village governance institutions). In these discussions, village women often pose questions that are answered promptly by a panel of experts. Through translation modules, responses go to the women in their vernacular language.

ICTs are also particularly useful in increasing the transparency and accountability of government, an application from which women can particularly profit. Two examples demonstrate how women used ICTs to call upon a national government and a local administration for greater accountability and transparency. In 1999 when a devastating cyclone hit south-eastern India killing hundreds of people, women in India found out from the Internet that the scale of the disaster had been made worse by negligence and ill preparedness of the State government disaster mitigation agency. They became active in calling the government into question on this matter. In another incident, when women students in Bangladesh faced administrative inaction in response to increasing instances of campus rape, they publicized their situation on the Internet. The resulting international and national response pressured the university administration to conduct an inquiry. In the years 1993 to 1994, in the Northwest Frontier Province of Pakistan, the Deutsche Gesellschaft for Technische Zusammerabeit (GTZ) with the Public Health Engineering Department of Pakistan introduced a community-based water and sanitation project that used video technology to effectively address gender issues and include women in the design and planning processes. The project aimed to install tube wells and household latrines, but recognized that women, the main managers and users of water, were excluded from village management and decision-making bodies since no man, foreigner or local, was permitted to meet with them. The Woman to Woman Video project provided women the opportunity to speak across the physical boundaries of the purdah (custom of seclusion), discuss what water and sanitation infrastructure could be afforded and participate in choosing the best water supply option for their households. A camera was used for filming and linked to a portable, car battery-powered monitor for playback, with no editing required (at the time, most villages had intermittent or no electricity supply).

The project showed that older women would agree to be filmed by women; women rather than male engineers were the designers, implementers and overseers of construction; women farmers became motivated to build latrines on discovering they could produce safe agricultural compost after eight months; and that as a result, women were better able to exert pressure on men to invest money in household innovations such as the installation of piped water supply (Wickett, 2004). A project that possibly captures the potential of ICTs in enabling women’s political and civic participation is the e-Seva (e-services) project, which began in the district of West Godavari in Andhra Pradesh, India. The project uses ICTs to provide access to various citizen-to-citizen (C2C) and citizen-to-government (C2G) services to the people living in rural areas. Under this project, web-enabled rural kiosks termed e-Seva centres were established at the mandal (a sub-district unit of administration) level. The unique thing about these centres is that they are run and managed by women SHGs and have been able to position the rural women as information leaders to help bridge the gender divide.

The e-Seva centres run on a district portal that allows access to various citizen-centric services. These services range from the issuance of various certificates to getting information about various programmes, and also go to the extent of networking citizens and allowing them the flexibility and convenience of mutually beneficial transactions. The project is an effort to strengthen women SHGs in the district, and through them provide citizens access to various government services in a user-friendly and transparent manner. The project offers a host of services to the citizens living in rural areas. The project allows citizens to file their grievances and applications for various government programmes in these centres. Every grievance is acknowledged and transferred online for bringing in field-level action.

The centres, through the portal, expect to provide a virtual meeting place for citizens to discuss issues relating to the district/villages, its problems and prospective solutions. Citizens can now freely interact with each other to post their ideas. This acts as an online forum for them to share their grievances, air their opinions and trigger the necessary social changes. It also provides opportunity to conduct opinion polls on the important topical issues leading to improved decision-making. The portal, through the kiosks, also enables the administration to pass down important social communications and advocacies for broadcast to the communities. It is important to note that while e-governance initiatives are promising, many focus only on administrative efficiency and fail to enable the citizen’s full political participation in consultative and decision-making bodies or mechanisms. This means that at best, such efforts render women as consumers of information and not equal stakeholders in development. At worst, they completely overlook women’s needs and the value of women’s knowledge in public policy and programme implementation. The SEWA model and the Woman to Woman Video project show that ‘giving women voice’ alone is not sufficient if there is a commitment to addressing gender equality. The voice expressed must be heard and responded to with substantive affirmative action. Otherwise, even e-government services will lose their relevance to women in the long run.


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Gender and ICT/Gender Analysis in Development is a Conscious Choice

What are the Challenges in Integrating a Gender Perspective?
Taking on a gender perspective in any type of initiative is fraught with challenges, both conceptual and practical, individual and communal. Fully integrating gender analysis means putting on the gender lens, not selectively, but consistently. This requires viewing all social phenomena from a gender perspective, probing into hierarchical, unequal and unjust relationships between women and men. At the individual level, this requires a consciousness on the part of the wearer to continuously challenge socially accepted roles of women and men that result in harmful health practices or role subordination. This can raise potentially serious conflicts within the individual. The individual conflict that is a necessary by-product of becoming aware of gender inequalities extends to the community level as well. Gender analysis requires communities to probe into existing relationships among community members towards understanding the inequalities and injustices that exist between different groups within the community. Community organizers, by and large, hesitate to get into gender issues precisely because it is seen as having a divisive function that raises conflict within the community. It is, by far, easier to focus on unifying communities along traditional ways of conduct and roles, rather than to address existing gender inequalities and concerns. There are also practical challenges in incorporating a gender perspective. This means allocating time and resources in understanding basic gender issues as well as applying such concepts into the context of policies and initiatives. At the community level, this requires a series of gender sensitivity workshops to prepare communities and individuals to address gender issues and concerns. It may also require the services of gender specialists to provide necessary advice to development agencies and planners, as well as gathering resources relevant to different gender issues.

Developing inclusive development strategies with women requires a variety of approaches, or a combination of these, such as the women’s empowerment approach, the affirmative action approach, and the Participatory Monitoring and Evaluation (PM&E) approach. Consultation with women and participatory decision-making are not sufficient to ensure that gender issues are considered and addressed in the area of ICT. A high level of consciousness and understanding too is needed to discern the kinds of gender issues being raised. Do these further perpetuate the gendered division of labour? Do these just support women in fulfilling their obligatory gendered roles and responsibilities in the household and in the community? What is usually brought to the surface in such consultations are practical gender needs rather than strategic gender interests. With the development of trust and a consistent consultative process, as well as the provision of space for women to come together to discuss these issues, strategic gender interests can be brought out more clearly and addressed more effectively. Incorporating gender is an ongoing, never-ending process of conceptualizing, activities, and reconceptualizing. Once the conscious decision and commitment to take on a gender perspective is made, development planners and agencies must be prepared for the long haul. This is perhaps the reason why many development planners and agencies, governments and organizations have remained indifferent to, or at the very least selective in, incorporating gender in their policies and programmes. Gender analysis is not something mechanical that an individual or community can conduct properly based on just guidelines and frameworks (see Box 8) as it can demand that the individual and the community question their own beliefs, long-time practices and values.

Despite the probable difficulty in internalizing and operationalizing a gender perspective and analysis, however, it is imperative that efforts of integration continue in development. As APC WNSP states, “women compose one-half of the world’s population and perform two-thirds of the world’s work hours, yet are everywhere poorer in resources and poorly represented in positions of power. As these inequalities constitute a systemic condition in all parts of the globe, it is imperative to take gender seriously in thinking about or understanding economic development and globalization. Gender analysis should include an examination of economics at the micro-, meso- and macro-levels and across a range of institutional contexts (households, communities, markets and states) to illustrate women’s disadvantageous position in ICT, and the male bias in measuring ICT outputs which renders women’s work invisible.” There are real gender inequalities and injustices in the ICT sector, and ICTs can result in further perpetuating such inequalities and injustices. There is a need to address these gender issues in ICT, and in order to do so, incorporating a gender perspective in planning, monitoring and implementing ICTled projects is non-negotiable.

What is the Difference between Practical Gender Needs and Strategic Gender Interests?
The differentiation of practical and strategic gender needs is theoretically significant for gender analysis. This distinction is often important in gender planning, becoming the basis for identifying actions. For evaluation purposes, assessing the extent of responding to both practical gender needs and strategic gender interests can inform the impact of projects and initiatives. Practical gender needs are the needs women identify that do not challenge their socially accepted roles. These needs relate to fulfilling their productive, reproductive and community managing roles and responsibilities. They are practical needs that include basic living commodities such as shelter, employment and food. While practical gender needs are related to existing gender roles, strategic gender interests challenge those roles in favour of equity and equality for women. Strategic gender interests begin with the assumption that women are subordinate to men as a consequence of social and institutional discrimination against women (see Box 9).

In practice, an approach that emphasizes practical needs may make room for recognition and consideration of strategic interests. On the other hand, satisfying practical needs reinforces the existing division of labour, which subordinates women. Having access to the Internet, for example, does not automatically change the relative position of women to men. An approach that emphasizes strategic interests, often taken up by activists, challenges existing social systems and structures in favour of equality for women. Project interventions may target gender disparities in one of two ways. They can address immediate short-term needs without necessarily challenging the structural causes of gender inequality, or they can address larger strategic issues relating to the gender interests of women and men to create conditions for gender equality. For example, a project designed to place computer terminals in rural public school classrooms addresses the immediate need of improving access to computers without necessarily addressing the strategic interests of improving disparities in female and male enrolment in primary and secondary schools. A framework that is useful in analysing gender and ICT is the newly emerging cultural analyses of technology. This framework understands both technology and gender not as fixed and given, but as cultural processes which (like other cultural processes) are subject to ‘negotiation, contestation, and, ultimately transformation’. This ‘technology as culture’ perspective goes further than the current viewpoint of women’s exclusion from full participation in technological work. In the cultural analyses of technology, technologies are ‘cultural products’, ‘objects’ or ‘processes’ which take on meaning when experienced in everyday life. Whereas technology has been defined as a predominantly male perspective, change comes through a total re-evaluation and appropriate remuneration of women’s skilled and technical tasks. Given this framework, transforming the gendered relations of technology is not merely focused on gaining access to knowledge as it is, but with creating knowledge itself. This means being involved in the level of definition, making meanings and creating technological culture.

Wearing the Gender Lens and Keeping Them On
As Sara Longwe puts it, “if we wear good spectacles, we shall be properly equipped to recognize the whole picture of the different types of gender problems and their levels of severity” (Longwe, 2002). Longwe identifies five levels of severity of gender problems. These are: (1) General Development Needs; (2) Women’s Special Needs; (3) Gender Concerns; (4) Gender Inequality; and (5) Gender Issues (see Figure 1).

Figure 1: Levels of Severity of Gender Problems

However, Longwe stresses that having the right spectacles is not enough. An added lens for analysing a gender issue is required. Such a lens provides us the ability to examine a gender issue in terms of its underlying causes, hence enabling the fine-tuning of a policy, programme or project in tackling a gender issue at its root cause, rather than just addressing effects at the surface (see Figure 2).

Figure 2: Underlying Causes of a Gender Issue

Innovative interventions underway in different countries offer a micro-level view of processes of change and prospects for transforming gender inequities into equitable opportunities and outcomes. These are referred to as gender transformative strategies (see Box 11).

Gender-aware interventions still remain an important source of learning for wider social policy, as they aim to challenge the cultural and social norms that underpin persistent denials of women’s rights to ICTs, and belie many of the assumptions upon which efficiency-oriented policies are based.