Gender Designs IT - Construction and Deconstruction of Information Society Technology

Gender Research and IT Construction: Concepts for a Challenging Partnership (p. 9)

Susanne Maass, Els Rommes, Carola Schirmer, Isabel Zorn

We, the representatives of the peoples of the world, (…) declare our common desire and commitment to build a people-centred, inclusive and development-oriented Information Society, where everyone can create, access, utilize and share information and knowledge, enabling individuals, communities and peoples to achieve their full potential in promoting their sustainable development and improving their quality of life, premised on the purposes and principles of the Charter of the United Nations and respecting fully and upholding the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

This Declaration of Principles for Information Society was made during the UN World Summit of the Information Society in Geneva 20031. Current transformations towards the Information Society are affecting professional and private lives, individual and societal interactions, economic and educational directions and technological developments.

Or, to put it the other way around: New technologies and in particular information and communication technologies offer a multitude of opportunities for transformations in the mentioned (and many more) fields. To emphasize this close connection the EU used the term ‘Information Society Technology’ (IST) in their 6th Framework and put forth the IST Vision: anywhere anytime natural access to IST services for all.

1 Information Society Technology – New Opportunities for Everyone?

Notwithstanding the ideological goals of creating an ‘inclusive’ Information Society for ‘everyone’, the chances offered by Information Society are unequally distributed, e.g. by country, class, ethnicity – and by gender, the very aspect this book will focus on. Equal opportunity is the agreed-upon goal of WSIS participants. With respect to gender, the EU set out to accomplish equal opportunity by its so-called ‘gender mainstreaming’ strategy.

This means that political actors need to assess the potential consequences of any decision for women and men, including those concerning implementation strategies for Information Society Technologies. Access to and ability to use IST are the prerequisites for participation in many of today’s social, cultural, political or economic activities.

Lack of opportunity as well as individual abstinence, both have the same effects: being a ‘nonuser’ of computers or the Internet means to be excluded from large parts of society, so inequalities in access and use are highly problematic. On top of this, involvement in IST design is a highly prestigious activity. Information technology business offers positions of power and good incomes for those with the appropriate (technical) education and enough self-confidence.

With respect to sex we currently find inequalities of various kinds. On a global scale the kind and quantity of IST use still differs widely.

Women’s access to Internet technology is generally lower than men’s, and this is true not only for the South but also for the North (except for the US): According to the SIGIS report, in January 2002 women in France, Germany, UK, Norway, Denmark and Sweden accounted for about 40-45% of all Internet users, with women in Italy and Spain just below 40% (Stewart 2002, 5).