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Gender, Information Technology and Developing Countries: An Analytical Study by Nancy Hafkin and Nancy Taggart
image of a man and a woman at the computer
Sections
Foreword
Introduction
Access & Obstacles
Education
Infrastructure
For the Poor
Uses
The Impact of "IT" & Globalization on Women's Work
Economic Empowerment
Political Empowerment
Policy
Conclusion
EndNotes & Links

Uses
Aside from upper-income enclaves, home access to a computer and the Internet is uncommon in developing countries. Most women who use IT do so at work, where, already, gender inequities that are well established in other sectors of the labor force are being replicated.

Most women entering the world of IT use it as a tool of production for routine office work, with far fewer women using it as a tool of communication for the creation and exchange of information. Few women are producers of IT, whether as Internet content providers, programmers, or software designers. Moreover, women in both developed and developing countries are conspicuously absent from IT decision-making echelons.

Among women using IT for higher-level communication and product creation purposes, the most prevalent application is networking for political advocacy, often by women's NGOs who adopted IT early on for this purpose. Women in developing countries also use networking to promote their business interests, an area far less developed than that of political activism but representing a possibility for further development.

E-mail is the application of choice among women's organizations and individual women in developing countries, as time and bandwidth constraints make Web use difficult.

Did you know?

In ministries of developing countries, out of 201 senior government officials responsible for IT, only 11 are women (5.5%). However, where women are in top positions, they are significant. Women serve as the ministers of communication or telecommunication in three countries (Mali, South Africa, and Colombia) and deputy ministers in six (Angola, Belarus, the Czech Republic, Ghana, the Kyrgyz Republic, and Tanzania). It is notable that there are more women in senior government IT positions in Africa than in any other region.

Compiled from lists of senior government officials using the ITU Global Directory, Geneva, 2001


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