The digital age has seen the growth of many opportunities for women, yet it has also brought new kinds of inequality and threats to their rights and well-being.
According to UN Women Australia, women remain underrepresented across the tech sector. Women were less likely to use digital services or enter tech-related careers and were more likely to face online harassment and violence.
“This limits not only their own digital empowerment but also the transformative potential of technology as a whole,” they stated in their article.
With the emergence of global crises such as the pandemic and the recession, technology is being pushed further than ever in establishing a safer and more equitable future for all.
Here are four steps on how one can take part in empowering women in digital.
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1. Address gender gaps in digital access and skills
With many countries pushing towards a digital-driven society, gender gaps in terms of digital access have emerged. Reports have shown that 63 per cent of women have access to the internet compared to 69 per cent of men and that 12 per cent of women are less likely to own a mobile phone.
Although efforts have been made to address the digital gender gap, marginalized groups like older women, rural women and women with disabilities still face significantly greater barriers to connectivity.
To further solve these gaps, factors such as better digital infrastructure, affordability, access to electricity, online privacy and safety, social norms and digital skills and literacy should be addressed in order to get women digitally connected.
According to UN Women Australia, this will require collaboration between governments, businesses and civil society and women’s organizations in establishing better digital plans and policies. Governments also need to invest in digital programmes and initiatives to give women the needed skills to lead, connect and successfully shape the digital space.
2. Encourage and empower women in the field of STEM
Women remain underrepresented in STEM education and careers globally, with only 28% of engineering graduates, 22% of AI workers, and less than one-third of tech sector employees being women. This limits their participation in shaping technology, research, investments, and policy.
Aside from this, stereotypes about women’s ability to excel in STEM fields discourage girls from pursuing careers in these fields. Those who do make it into tech often face an actively hostile environment, with a significant pay gap, lower rates of promotion, and workplace harassment, leading women to consider leaving the workforce altogether.
These barriers should be addressed by providing universal broadband access, ensuring digital literacy, eliminating gender biases in schools, connecting STEM to other disciplines, and creating targeted reskilling and upskilling programs can all help increase girls’ interest in STEM.
Expanded labour regulations, such as a living minimum wage and regulations against pay discrimination, can also improve the position of women in the labour market.
3. Tackle the tech needs of women
Women’s exclusion from tech and innovation spaces has led to digital tools that fail to meet their needs. These gaps also mean that women produce fewer data than men, which leads to unequal representation in data sets and major downstream effects on machine learning and AI-enabled service delivery.
To create more inclusive and less biased tech, human rights should be at the centre of design and regulation processes. Marginalized and vulnerable women, social and behavioural scientists, and human rights experts should be involved in the design of new digital tools, and ethical frameworks should be grounded in international human rights standards and norms.
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4. Combat gender-based violence in technology
Tech gender-based violence usually causes physical, sexual, psychological, social, political, and/or economic harm to women, which limits their participation and ability to engage in online spaces. The risk of online gender-based violence is even greater for women who face intersecting forms of discrimination, including women of colour, women with disabilities, and LGBTIQ+ individuals.
The lack of a universal definition and global norms and standards on online gender-based violence exacerbates the issue, and existing legal frameworks may not be applicable to new forms of tech-generated violence. Furthermore, underreporting of online gender-based violence is common, with only a fraction of cases reported to both platforms and protective agencies.
To address this, governments should develop expanded legal frameworks in coordination with women’s organizations and centred around human rights and survivor-informed approaches. Policymakers should work with the justice sector, civil society organizations, the media and other sectors to develop coherent responses and strategies for mitigation.
Aside from this, design processes based on human rights can improve reporting and moderation systems, and teaching digital citizenship can help cover issues of online violence while instilling empathy and ethical digital media use. Teaching boys and men to become advocates for gender equality is also crucial.
Eliza is a content producer and editor at Public Spectrum. She is an experienced writer on topics related to the government and to the public, as well as stories that uplift and improve the community.
