Creating An Outer Circle In the Digital World: Participation of Women In the E-Government System (original) (raw)
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The emergent information or network society 1 context offers a range of opportunities for women and girls to enhance their participation across economic, socio-cultural and public-political realms of life, as well as the scope for enhancing their individual freedoms. The Post-2015 agenda therefore, both in terms of goals and related targets and indicators, has to promote and measure women's participation in the information society and their access to and effective use of the Internet and ICTs. This paper recommends that the question of gender and ICTs must be addressed in the post-2015 global development agenda, in the following manner: 1.There should be a specific goal related to the meaningful and effective use of ICTs and the Internet, that is measured through gender sensitive targets and indicators. This should take into account the quality of access, and not just availability. 2.There should be a specific goal related to gender equality and women's and girls' empowerment that takes into account access to and effective use of ICTs and the Internet as a target (with appropriate indicators) within the goal. The larger goal of women's empowerment in the contemporary information society cannot be dis-embedded from the context that ICTs are creating. 3. To facilitate a nuanced assessment, the indicators that are evolved under the above-mentioned goals must capture the individual-household, public-institutional and community-social aspects of access to, and use of, ICTs and the Internet. The paper also highlights the areas that global and national policy and programmatic frameworks need to address, in order to promote the gender equality agenda in the information society context: (a)Promotion of access and effective use of the Internet and ICTs (b)Creation of opportunity structures for women and (c)Building equitable techno-architectures. Enclosures: Annex 1 'Gender Equality and ICTs: Existing Global Frameworks' 1 'Information society' is a term that has been coined to refer to the current context where the use, distribution, consumption and manipulation of information is increasingly at the heart of our social, economic and cultural life. The rise of the knowledge economy as opposed to a Fordist, industrial economy and the increasing reduction of space and time barriers to information and communication flows with the growth of digital technologies, the rise and increasing significance of networks in all spheres of life, are some of its most visible characteristics. The term 'network society' was coined by Manuel Castells to describe this context, as an attempt to draw attention to the centrality and significance of networks.
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The paper reports from a European study of efforts of inclusion to close a gendered digital divide. The authors argue that inclusion is not just a mirror image of exclusion and to achieve inclusion it is not sufficient to curb exclusion mechanisms but to enhance positive measures of inclusion. A variety of inclusion strategies have been studied and the authors conclude that 'one size does not fit all' so that to reach a wide audience a combination of many different strategies are needed. More women users is not sufficient to increase women's influence of ICT development however. Particular measures are needed to recruit more women into the ICT profession and to curb marginalisation within the profession.
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This edition of GISWatch explores women’s rights and gender through the lens of information and communications technologies (ICTs). It includes a series of expert thematic reports on issues such as access to infrastructure, participation, online disobedience, and sexuality online, as well as 46 country reports on topics like the rights of domestic workers, trafficking in women, participation in governance, child brides, and the right to abortion. GISWatch 2013 shows that gains in women’s rights made online are not always certain or stable. While access to the internet for women has increased their participation in the social, economic and governance spheres, there is there is another side to these opportunities: online harassment, cyberstalking, and violence against women online all of which are on the increase globally. This GISWatch is a call to action, to the increased participation of women in all forms of technological governance and development, and to a reaffirmation and strengthening of their rights online. GISWatch is published annually and is a joint initiative by the Association for Progressive Communications (APC) and the Humanist Institute for Development Cooperation (Hivos).
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In this position/experience paper we address some issues related to gender and technology with the firm stand that the empowerment of girls and women has to rely non only on the access to technology on the utilizer side, but also – and maybe above all – on the inclusion of women on the producer side, and that achieving such objective demands engagement and explicit actions from stakeholders at different levels, including the educational and the scientific levels. In particular, we outline a virtuous chain in which society favors the interest of girls in ICT and their engagement in ICT studies, education professionals prepare girls for ICT careers, and the scientific/technology community explicitly acknowledges the beneficial role of women in the design process. With this goal in mind, after discussing example actions at societal level, we briefly present main features and results of the PinKamP program, an initiative at educational level organized by the Department of Information En...