Researcher Spotlight
Women and Girls Empowerment with Technology
Date: September 2021
Review Author: Ms. Wolayat Tabasum Niroo and Dr. Helen Crompton
Technology can be used as a powerful tool to support people globally. In particular, it can be used as a tool for empowering women and girls. Researchers have explored this avenue going beyond the use of technology in developed educational settings and uncovering how women, regardless of the level of education, use technology to their advantage in developing countries.
From the mEducation Alliance Researcher Database Martin Hilbert, April Mackey, and Nicole Pitchford are three researchers that stood out as having conducted work in the use of technology to empower women and girls. These researchers are highlighted in the table below:
Name of Researcher | University/Organization | Research on Women and Girls |
|---|---|---|
Martin Hilbert | University of California, Davis | Dr. Hilbert pursues a multidisciplinary approach to understanding the role of information, communication, and knowledge in the development of complex social systems. He also looks at the technology empowerment of women in developing countries. |
University Saskatchewan | Dr. Mackey’s focus area is women's empowerment and intimate partner violence. The author also highlights the use of technology in relation to Nursing education and women’s empowerment in developing countries. | |
University of Nottingham | Dr. Pitchford focuses on gender differences in using technology, such as smartphones and tablets to support the development of early math skills. The author’s concentration is on primary education in the UK. |
Martin Hilbert in particular has conducted a great deal of work on communication, ICT, digital divide, and gender differences.
Dr Martin created and coordinated the Information Society Programme of the United Nations Regional Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean. He worked as United Nations Economic Affairs Officer for 15 years. He has written several books about digital technology for international development and published them in recognized academic journals. His research interests are International.
Dr. Hilbert’s article, Digital Gender Divide or Technologically Empowered Women in Developing Countries?, focuses on women’s access to and use of digital Information and Communication Technology (ICT) in developing countries. The author uncovers that the reason why fewer women access and use ICT is a direct result of their unfavorable conditions with respect to employment, education, and income.
This study is the result of data analysis from 12 Latin American and 13 African countries from 2005 to 2008. The findings indicate that discrimination against women in the workforce presents women as fewer users of technology. In other words, because there are fewer female employees than men in developing countries, especially in the field of ICT, research shows women as less friendly to technology. Hilbert challenges this concept. The author argues that since women are better communicators than men, enabling them to use ICT will highly likely present an opportunity to fight long-standing inequalities.
In his article, Technological Information Inequality as an Incessantly Moving Target: The Redistribution of Information and Communication Capacities Between 1986 and 2010, Dr. Hilbert analyzes the trend of technology increasing and decreasing inequalities in respect to information and communication capacities among and within societies nationally and internationally. His article argues that “the digital divide has gone into a second stage, which is based on a relative universalization of technological devices and a continuously evolving divide in terms of communication capacity.” Analyzing a comprehensive data set (1,100 sources), the author found that there were inequalities in access to, usage of, and impact of digitized information flows and that this trend has been fluctuating.
For more details: Please visit this webpage.
Researcher email: hilbert@ucdavis.edu
Hilbert, M. (2011). Digital gender divide or technologically empowered women in developing countries? A typical case of lies, damned lies, and statistics, Women Studies International Forum, 34, 479-489.
Hilbert, M. (2014). Technological information inequality as an incessantly moving target: The redistribution of information and communication capacities between 1986 and 2010. Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology, 65(4), 821-835.
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