What We're Hopeful About For 2017: Gender, ICT, And Data Availability
There’s no denying that for many people, 2016 was an annus horribilis, and 2017 hasn’t exactly gotten off to the best start either. This is particularly true for women’s rights and gender relations - you can read our thoughts on this in our blog post from 2 weeks ago.
However, amidst all this bad news and genuine fears for women’s rights and gender equality, there is one thing about 2016 in the world of gender and ICT that we’re celebrating - the growing increase in the availability of gender disaggregated data for ICT access and use. My Panoply Digital colleague Ronda Zelezny-Green and I run a bi-monthly Gender and Mobiles newsletter, and one of the things we were most excited and hopeful about about is the growing availability of gender data in ICT. It's so important to understand the current situation of women's access to, and use, of ICT, and to be able to benchmark any changes, but there's been a relative lack of reliable large-scale data to date.
However, this is changing: in 2016 alone, we had a number of big reports that have specific data points around women's access to and use of ICT, both at a country level and at a national level. We thought it might be useful to lay out some of our favourites here - to serve as a resource for others, and to draw attention to this exciting trend, one we hope will continue in 2017.
The Web Foundation’s Women’s Rights Online Report has full quantitative data sets from 10 countries across Africa, Asia and Latin America that looks at women’s internet access in these countries in particular.
Following on from this, the Web Foundation’s Digital Gender Audit released report cards that assess progress on closing the digital gender divide in 10 countries across Africa, Asia and Latin America, looking at five barriers in particular, and how the countries score against them.
The ITU has recently put out the Measuring the Information Society 2016 Report, its annual report on the world’s ICT data, giving data points on who is and who isn’t connected. Compiled from national statistics databases, 2016’s report looks particularly at the ICT indicators that track progress towards the SDGs. SDG Goal 5 is around gender, and the report has some excellent country-level data to benchmark women’s access to, and use of, mobile phones and the Internet. It also has a section on barriers to mobile adoption, and focuses particularly on gender.
Our good friends at mSTAR and FHI360 recently put out an ICT Works blog post about gender disaggregated data, and put together an extensive list of key gender and ICT resources, that we at Panoply Digital were lucky enough to feed into. You can read the blog post here, and find the list here.
Speaking of mSTAR, they’ve worked with USAID to put together a Gender and ICT Survey Toolkit designed not only to help users collect gender disaggregated data of their own, but also to help users analyse that data and use insights for ICT4D and gender programme design and delivery. Again, we at Panoply Digital have fed into the Toolkit, and we’re looking forward to seeing it launched publicly in Spring 2017 - watch this space!
Are there any other reports that help drive the discussion forward around gender and ICT? Any big data sets you’d add to this list? Let us know in the comments!
“There’s still a view that technology will solve everything. But there’s a growing understanding that technology also comes with challenges with real challenges and ethical quandaries.”
Quote from an informant for the Principles for Digital Development report
This quick content analysis of the report is highly probelmatic because as practitioners and academics alike surely have seen, taking care to "do no harm" in digital development practice is never straightforward, nor is a simple box-ticking exercise sufficient in terms of reflecting on whether ethical digital development practice has been exhibited. The fact that ethics isn't made an important digital development principle in itself indicates that much work remains to be done here. There are myriad and complex considerations to be made relating to the context of implementation as well as to the contexts where digital development projects and programs are dreamed up. Moreover, how and where the funding for these projects and programs are sourced can present ethical dilemmas: Where private sector funding is being used, are these funds being directed to the good of the people or to further enhance corporate agendas? At the same time, we might even ask if in the process of enacting digital deveopment, given practitioners' and academics' motivations for continued/stable salaries and/or (further) funding to do other digital development work, is there is a good framework in place which ensures that this group of actors does not unintentionally inflict its own harm through acts of self-preservation that might benefit them but not necessarily the stakeholders they are supposed to be serving?
What if there was a system whereby digital development practitioners and academics were able to peer-review each other's work, with ethics analyses prioritized? Sounds onerous, to be sure, but could be worth it if it means we work to mitigate or eliminate the ethical issues that might arise in digital development, particularly when working with vulnerable populations.
I really hope that these ethical questions and more are addressed during this #ICTDEthics workshop since the Principles for Digital Development raised expectations in this area with its title but in the end failed to deliver. I look forward to continuing my own contributions in this space, starting with a recent article I published in Girlhood Studies about ethical considerations to be made when doing digital research with girls, particularly research that involves surveillance. And Drs Kleine and Dearden are compiling their own list of ICT4D ethics resources, which will be shared at this workshop and soon in other conference forums.
What about our readers? How do you apply ethical practice in your ICT4D work? Please sound off below!
