May 27, 2008 1
Gender and technology around the globe
We have a woman at work whose job is to take a look at gender issues in our projects, in other’s projects, and in general. Of course, she mostly focuses on gender issues as they relate to health. This morning I sat diagonally behind her and was prompted to think about the inclusion of females in IT in developing countries (this came to mind as I misread over her shoulder the title of the book she was reading). OK, so lazyweb helped me search on this topic and I’ve found one rather interesting report called Gender, Information Technology and Developing Countries: An Analytical Study. written by USAID and Learnlink.
I’m still delving into the report, and I am sure there are other reports out there, but a couple things already stand out to me. First is the complete lack of data on the subject from Africa. I think this is mostly a matter of these data not specifying gender at all, but I sure would love to see something for the continent most of my work focuses on. Second is this nugget of information:
Statistics by country are particularly puzzling because there does 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 gender empowerment. Developing countries with high female Internet use have low overall Internet use. In countries where the Internet is used primarily by an urban elite, women are well represented. But as GDP rises, the overall dominance of men edges the percentage of female use lower.
At first this paragraph gives a brief hope that as a country develops, the “digital divide” wouldn’t be affected by literacy rate and GDP in developing countries (HUGE problems for females many of these places) but then the last sentence seems to quell that hope.
This is really quite interesting – there must be loads more to learn in relation. Of course, I’d also love to see more information about females working in IT, not just using these technologies.
As a side-note, I am convinced that the larger software companies have so disruptively hijacked IT education in the developing world (more attempts to get folks tied into their licensing just in case there is an IT bubble in that region) that the options for anyone to enter the industry is limited by the costs of learning, and the narrow scope of that education.