International Day of the Girl and the Gender Digital Gap
Written by Daniella Kahane, WIN Executive Director + CEO
As you might know, today is International Day of the Girl.
For this year’s International Day of the Girl we focus on the digital gender gap, something that we, living in the United States with mainstream broad access to the internet, might not think about so often. But the truth is, in many countries, the digital gender gap is extremely pervasive and has been intensified both in severity and in consequence due to the global pandemic and our increased reliance on digital communication.
According to a recent study from the Alliance for Affordable Internet from the World Wide Web organization, women are disproportionately excluded from internet access across the world. Men are 21% more likely to be online than women globally, which goes up to 52% in lesser developed countries. It is devastating not only for the women it excludes but to society as a whole. It clearly has broad socio-economic impacts that are immeasurable. From an economic standpoint, the report delineates that governments are missing out on hundreds of billions of dollars because of this digital gender gap. Closing this gap in the next five years gives policymakers a $524 billion USD opportunity, according to the study.
Obviously, this data is profound but what is even more alarming is the rate - or lack thereof - that this gender gap is closing. In the 32 countries studied, just over a third of women were connected to the internet compared to almost half of men. Since 2011 the gender gap has only dropped half a percentage point, from 30.9% to 30.4%. They attribute this gap to a few issues such as affordability, device gaps, wage gaps, privacy/security fears, literacy and computer skills, and the cumulative effect of these gaps which help to reinforce the myth in certain societies that access to technology is somehow immure or inappropriate. The report plainly and strongly makes the economic case for why eradicating this gender gap makes fiscal sense for developing and leading counties alike.
But there is hope. Despite the barriers that exist, women are increasingly using the internet to navigate a place for themselves in the digital economy and achieve remarkable things and this is what today is all about. We want to celebrate the young women who are forging a new model, who are wielding the internet and technology to make us better, to develop new ways that contribute to society, that create more opportunity and advancement. We long for the day when today serves as but a reminder to the world that a society that excludes girls or women in any way belongs in the annals of history, a blemish on our records, that we are learning from, improving upon, and healing from, and not a reality of the present that we are still having to fight against. Of course, this is more aspirational than it is reality but we hold firmly to the belief that we will get there for the consequences of not getting there are simply too great.
On a personal note, I grew up in a family of girls. My mom is one of five sisters. Her mother, one of two sisters, myself one of three sisters, and now I am the mother of three girls. Girl pride is in my blood. And yet, I will never forget the often-quoted line my grandfather used to jokingly say: “girls are the best… if you can’t have boys.” My grandfather was a loving father, and very proud of his girls —who went off to Ivy League universities, and had masters or doctoral degrees. But nevertheless, his joke represented and unfortunately still represents a pervasive cultural and societal bias… the myth that boys are somehow better than girls. Needless to say, this toxic messaging has been around since time immemorial and it's not easy to unwind the clock or heal from centuries and centuries of ingrained credo.
Like a deeply imprinted tattoo upon our skin, no matter how many times we wash, or rub, or attempt to erase it, the original marks prove hard to remove. And so instead, we must tell a new story to ourselves and to our children. We must leave the old tattoo and draw a new one next to it, a corrective one. As Maya Angelou famously said, “When you know better, you do better.”
Too many of us ‘know better’ so let us seize the opportunity to celebrate the female Changemakers, the tech-trailblazers, and the brave girls and young women who are paving their own way online (and off), leading for themselves and for the young women who have yet to come.
Advance Women's Digital Skills
WIN Together, WIN's not-for-profit arm, has donated to the EQUALS Digitial Skills Fund in honor of International Day of the Girl to help empower more girls in technology. Join us by also donating to the EQUALS Digital Skills Fund which supports a range of capacity-building trainings to advance women’s digital skills, active citizenship, and civic participation through technology.
Learn more about the Fund and its goals.
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