Women yet to catch up with men in broadband access

Commissioners gathered for the 7th meeting of the Broadband Commission for Digital Development have set a new target which mandates ‘gender equality in broadband access by the year 2020'.

At present, ITU figures confirm that in the developing world, women are much less likely to have access to technology than their male counterparts. While that disparity is lower in developed countries, a measureable gap nonetheless still exists, even in the rich world.

"Women's access to ICTs and particularly broadband must be made a key pillar of the post-2015 global development agenda," said Dr Hamadoun I Toure, ITU secretary-general and co-vice chair of the Commission.

"The mobile miracle has clearly demonstrated how powerful information and communication technologies can be in driving economic growth. However, figures from ITU and its sister agencies like UNESCO and UNDP show a clear ‘gender gap' in access to technology. We need to redress that imbalance to ensure that all people are empowered to take control of their own destinies through ICTs," commented Toure.

The new gender target was one decisive outcome of the first face-to-face meeting of the Broadband Commission Working Group on Gender, which was launched in New York in 2012 by Geena Davis, actor, advocate and ITU's Special Envoy on Women and Girls.

Chaired by Helen Clark, administrator of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), the Working Group on Gender meeting attracted 69 Commissioners, special representatives and guest experts, making it the best-attended Working Group of the Commission to date.

The gender group meeting featured presentations by a number of organizations leading projects in the ‘gender and technology' space, including Changecorp, GSMA, Intel, Telecentre.org and ITU. ITU's digital literacy partnership with Telecentre.org has already trained over 625,000 women in basic digital skills, and is well on track to meet its target of one million women trained by 2015.