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Taking a byte of technology: Women and ICTs

This issue of Agenda focuses on the intersections between gender and Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs). As an organisation working precisely at this intersection, Women’sNet is privileged to be associated with the publication of this important issue of the journal. We argue that, as feminists and women’s rights activists, it is imperative that we engage with ICTs – from the level of policy and regulation to content development – to ensure that women benefit from the ICT revolution. We attempt, in broad brush strokes, to highlight some of the key debates and challenges in our work on gender and ICTs in Southern Africa. Recognising that ICTs are only one tool among many required to support efforts towards women’s equality, we nevertheless argue that they are a critical site of intervention. We will discuss the current debates around censorship and content regulation, moving on to an examination of appropriate and relevant content that responds directly to women’s needs, highlighting three projects that both respond to the dearth of women-friendly and relevant content on the World Wide Web and challenge dominant stereotypes about who speaks and who is spoken for. Lastly, we examine the technologies themselves, as tools for women’s empowerment. The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD, 2002) defines ICTs as ‘the means of generating, processing, transporting and presenting information’. Thus, ICTs refer to multi-level phenomena and include IT equipment as well as services, such as media and broadcast, internet service provision, libraries, commercial information service provision as well as networkbased information services. The Association for Progressive Communications classifies the new ICTs into three groups, all of which are ‘converging’ from formerly disparate to shared platforms (Nicol, 2003).