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Gender and ICT: Statistics and Indicators

Wikis > Gender and ICT: Statistics and Indicators

Observation and anecdotal evidence have identified a gender component to the digital divide in several developed and many developing countries, but there are little data to document it. The paucity of data makes it difficult, if not impossible, to make the case to policymakers for the inclusion of gender issues in ICT policies, plans, and strategies. Hafkin, Nancy J., and Sophia Huyer. “Women and gender in ICT statistics and indicators for development.” Information Technologies & International Development 4.2 (2007): pp-25, http://itidjournal.org/index.php/itid/article/viewFile/254/124 (accessed 20 October 2014)

“Without data, there is no visibility; without visibility, there is no priority”INTERNATIONAL TELECOMMUNICATION UNION; Document WGGI-2/7-E 20 June 2003, http://www.itu.int/ITU-D/pdf/5196-007-en.pdf

Despite the lack of gender-specific quantitative data, project-level qualitative data have established that ICTs are not gender neutral. ICTs impact men
and women deferentially, and in almost all cases, women have many disadvantages that result in their having less access to the technology and therefore less use of it. The policy implication of this disparity in information access, especially for developing countries, is that unless special interventions are made, most women will not benefit from the information society to the extent that men do.

ICT contribution to Gender Equality

New technologies have made it possible for people to communicate, network, and collaborate on a more global scale than was previously possible. Alliances have been built between the local and global. For individual men and women, the Internet has been a space that allows both for anonymity and solidarity, for self-expression and for building connections. ICTs have also facilitated the building of a more inclusive public sphere: enabling the aged, the disabled, and the discriminated to communicate, to network, and to reach policy makers. Particularly for sexual minorities, the Internet has provided subversive territory in which to assert their identity and lobby for their human rights. Networking can also enable women’s organisations to mobilise international public opinion against discriminatory and unjust actions at local levels.Gurumurthy, Anita. “Promoting gender equality? Some development-related uses of ICTs by women.” Development in practice 16.6 (2006): 611-616, http://www.bridge.ids.ac.uk/docs/gurumurthy_icts.pdf More in detail, ICT may promote gender equality through the following channels:

  • Building women’s capacity;Several organisations are building the capacities of girls and women to make new ICTs accessible and useful to them. At one level, girls and women are being provided with general training in ICTs for ICT-related jobs; at another, women in business, women entrepreneurs,and women in the professions are systematically being supported for skill enhancement, career growth, and greater work efficiency.
  • Dissemination of rights-based information for women; New ICTs have been used by gender-equality advocates all over the world to disseminate rights-based information. From multilateral agencies like UN Women to feminist activists at local levels, actors at different levels are involved in creating, collating, and disseminating material on rights – legal rights, sexual and reproductive rights, women’s human rights. This is done through websites, e-magazines, and email.
  • ICTs as amplifiers of women’s voices and perspectives; ICTs can provide spaces for diverse, bottom-up, and low-cost communication. They can amplify women’s voices, and help publicise women’s experiences and perspectives. The project of gender justice requires that mainstream spaces be infused with new worldviews that derive from women’s own experiences and that challenge, qualify, or expand accepted ideas.

Even if theoretically the potential positive impact of ICT on gender equality has been agreed within researchers, a lack of appropriate indicators makes it difficult to quantitatively explain this relation. Recently, however, some groups have begun shedding light on women, gender, and the information society.

Korean Work on Gender and ICT Statistics

Since the first quarter of 2000, the Korean Network Information Center (KRNIC) has undertaken and published quarterly surveys of Internet use by approximately 5,700 people. In the surveys, 17 data categories are collected and disaggregated by sex, and in most cases, also by age. KRNIC’s survey categories for which data are available by sex are shown in the Appendix. In 2001, the Ministry of Gender Equality released a Study of Women’s Informatization Survey and Index Development (Republic of Korea, Ministry of Gender Equality, 2001) to document and examine
the gender digital divide in Korea. The ministry based its research on five categories, from which it developed an index of women’s rate of informatization. (Informatization is defined as the extent to which women are part of the process by which information technologies have transformed economy and society.) The categories covered are awareness, access, utilization, skill, and effects, and they are disaggregated by sex to measure comparative informatization. The results showed that women’s informatization measured 88.0% compared with that of men. Although women scored very highly on awareness, skills, and effect, overall women were less involved with ICT than men—particularly in terms of access and usage: the access rate for women was only 22.9% compared with that of men and their use of the Internet was 28.2% compared with that of men. After the index was developed, a report was published comparing the informatization rates of men and women (Republic of Korea, Ministry of Gender Equality, 2001). The findings indicated a serious
digital divide by age, with women’s scores on all categories of the index decreasing with age beginning at 20 years old. Moreover, it identified a serious
gap in informatization among those women older than 50 years. Not surprisingly, women who earned higher incomes reported a higher informatization rate than those with lower incomes. Hafkin, Nancy J., and Sophia Huyer. “Women and gender in ICT statistics and indicators for development.” Information Technologies & International Development 4.2 (2007): pp-25, http://itidjournal.org/itid/article/viewFile/254/124

Orbicom: measuring the digital divide

Orbicom released its second report in September 2005 on measuring the infostate of 192 countries in the world. The women and the information society component of the 2005 Orbicom report consisted of two parts. The first part attempted to compile existing sex disaggregated statistical data and offer a quantitative analysis of the gender digital divide. It provided a macro-level view of its magnitude and evolution and also examined key aspects of the data, particularly access and patterns of use; ICT literacy, education, and skills; ICT-related employment; and the gender digital divide’s relationship with other digital divides. It furthermore contained statistical evidence and analysis of women’s experience in both developed and developing countries in addition to a section that quantified the gender digital divide by constructing a pilot statistical database based on existing pockets of gender ICT data. Problems encountered in the course of the work included a lack of consistent gender statistics in many countries, lack of common definitions and concepts, and a mixture of public and private data sources. The specific country context emerged from the statistical data as a crucial variable for assessing gender
and ICT use. Other important variables included access options (home, office, or other public access), labor force participation, government policies, and
sociocultural norms. It was found that while the gender divide tends to narrow at higher levels of education, a gap remains nevertheless. In addition to
education, other factors that were found to affect ICT use by gender were age and location (urban versus rural). It was also clear that the proportion of female Internet users declined steeply with age (Huyer et al., 2005). At the same time, a clear recognition emerged that more than statistical data were needed to address gender disparities in the context of the information society. The second part of the Orbicom gender report was based on a comprehensive framework that defined important elements of the main gender issues in ICT and summarized the qualitative data on the topic culled from fieldwork experiences, case studies, and anecdotal and contextual evidence (Hafkin, 2003b). Taken in its totality, the project developed a more holistic view of the gender digital divide than had previously been possible.Hafkin, Nancy J., and Sophia Huyer. “Women and gender in ICT statistics and indicators for development.” Information Technologies & International Development 4.2 (2007): pp-25, http://itidjournal.org/itid/article/viewFile/254/124

Digital Opportunity Index

The Digital Opportunity Index (DOI) is a product of the Partnership on Measuring ICT for Development, a global multistakeholder initiative that includes the ITU, Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development , UNCTAD, United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization Institute for Statistics, UNICT Task Force (now the Global Alliance for ICT and Development–GAID), the World Bank, the
United Nations regional economic commissions, and the Statistical Office of the European Communities (Eurostat). The major work on the DOI Index is done
by ITU, UNCTAD, and the Korean Agency for Digital Opportunity and Promotion. The DOI launched in 2005 supersedes the previous indices of both ITU’s Digital Access Index and UNCTAD’s ICT Diffusion Index. The partnership was established with the explicit aim of encouraging the collection and use of ICT statistics disaggregated by socioeconomic categories such as age, gender, income, and location. In 2004, the ITU published the following statement about the need for the partnership: Until recently, infrastructure had been considered as the main obstacle to improving access to ICTs. Existing indicators are therefore often infrastructure-based.

“But there is growing evidence that other factors, such as affordability and knowledge, are an important part of the access picture. It is widely recognized that new indicators are needed. The new environment, with a growing emphasis on reducing the digital divide, requires access and usage indicators disaggregated by socio-economic categories such as age, gender, income and location. To measure the ICT picture in full, new multi-stakeholder partnerships will be required . . . “(ITU, 2003, p. 3).

Despite this background, the DOI multistakeholder partnership does not use any sex disaggregated statistics but rather encourages countries to use its core indicators, which lend themselves to disaggregation by sex, and which the DOI partnership identities as auxiliary variables, to “generate a gender-based DOI” (ITU, 2005). The DOI suggests that its modular structure makes it amenable to breakdowns by sex that could be used for gender analysis (ITU, 2006). In its first report, DOI uses the case of the Czech Republic, which does collect sex-disaggregated ICT statistics, as an example of a gender-disaggregated DOI that other countries could produce (ITU, 2006). DOI is an index based on relatively few indicators (11) thus making it less expensive and more feasible for countries to collect.Hafkin, Nancy J., and Sophia Huyer. “Women and gender in ICT statistics and indicators for development.” Information Technologies & International Development 4.2 (2007): pp-25, http://itidjournal.org/itid/article/viewFile/254/124

References

7.GENDER and ICTs. University of Sussex, Institute of Development Studies, 2004.

8.Huyer, Sophia, et al. “Women in the information society.” From the digital divide to digital opportunities: Measuring infostates for development (2005): 135-196.

9.Hafkin, N. (2003b, December). Gender issues in ICT statistics and indicators, with particular emphasis on developing countries. Paper presented at the UNECE/UNCTAD/UIS/ITU/OECD/Eurostat Statistical Workshop: Monitoring the Information Society: Data, Measurement and Methods, Geneva, Switzerland. Retrieved August 30, 2005, from http://www.unece.org/stats/documents/ces/sem.52/3.e.pdf

10.ITU Internet Report 2006: digital.life

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