Women's World Majlis
All Online? Not Yet: Closing the Mobility and Digital Gender Gap
The rapid advancement of the Fourth Industrial Revolution will ensure that digital technologies pervade every corner of our lives. Women and girls lost out in the previous ICT revolution, and we cannot let this happen again. Thus, the persistence of a large digital gender gap remains a massive concern.
Across the world, men are 21% more likely to have access to the internet than women. In the least developed countries this number rises to 52%. A 2021 report of the Alliance for Affordable Internet showed that in a large number of low and lower-middle-income countries, the digital gender gap has remained nearly static over the last decade, at around 30.5%. Targeted government efforts to improve women’s connectivity also remain limited: over 40% of countries have no meaningful policies or programs addressing women’s access to internet (Alliance for Affordable Internet, 2020).
The statistics are clear and so are the wins that would come from bridging this digital gender divide. Online exclusion of women and girls results in significant economic losses, particularly in low and lower-middle income countries. Excluding women and girls from the internet also results in them missing out on other benefits and opportunities: from the sharing of knowledge, to access to job searches and digital financial services, to the setting up of an e-commerce business, to simply keeping in touch with friends and family abroad.
Access is a real problem, but not the only problem. We are facing a profound digital skills gap and a lack of digital literacy amongst women, from the lowest to the highest levels. According to the OECD (2018), men are four times more likely to have (basic) digital skills. At the higher end of the skills spectrum, recruiters in Silicon Valley estimated that women represent less than 1% of technical job applications in artificial intelligence and data science (UNESCO, 2019).
