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Preeti Mehra

Is there a gender digital divide? The question has the knack of evoking laughter, ridicule, cynicism and scorn. Not many can associate technology with a gender issue. Not in this day and age, they say, as they point out that women are as savvy as men on the keyboards, they talk as long on the cell phone and they are filling up more and more jobs at call centres and in software companies. But scratch the surface and a different story emerges ...

First and foremost, if the digital divide is a numbers game, women in respect to men are very, very far from the 50:50 mark. It's nothing but sheer logic — more men than women work in urban India and that's where technology is largely used. The generation divide also favours the male gender — in the over 45s, even less women are technology savvy or use it regularly, may it be the Internet, e-mail, laptops or cell phones. And that's not because they cannot pick up the skills, but culturally they have not been exposed to technology as much as men. Even traditionally women have stayed away from technology — only few drive automobiles, hardly a handful would mess around with the car engine or fix wires in the electricity meter.

No, it's not the genes to blame. If it were, the younger generation would not be taking to computers, cars and call centres like a duck takes to water. In fact, the fact that women have not been exposed sufficiently to gender is corroborated by a study on gender and the digital divide. Sponsored by the Gender and Development Thematic Group and the Girls Education Thematic Group of the World Bank and in collaboration with Cisco Systems, the initial findings of the study revealed that there are specific reasons why women have less access to technology and participate in smaller numbers in technology training in developing countries.

The researchers Nancy Taggart and Chloe O'Gara for the Academy of Educational Development found that technology training programmes are often located in departments in universities and colleges with low female enrolment such as engineering colleges etc. Besides, in most of these countries there is only a small pool of women interested in information technology (IT) from the outset, which results in fewer women seeking IT training. They also found low a number of recruitment activity targeting women and though developing countries are trying to reach low-income women, many of the trainees are still from the middle to upper class.

Using these initial findings, O'Gara and Taggart have made recommendations for increasing women's participation in and access to these training programs. Some of these recommendations include that training and testing should be offered in a structured, culturally acceptable environment. Also that training programmes should be offered in other departments as well, places that have a higher percentage of female enrolment.

They opined that to make the difference, recruitment materials should be developed that appeals to prospective female students and that depicts women in action-oriented, interactive roles in the IT workplace. Creating support groups for women in these training programs to serve as professional networks could also help bridge the yawning gap. And that could be done by partnering with women's organisations and NGOs, offering scholarships or reduced fees to female students and incentives to female instructors

The researchers acknowledged the need for the study to be extended beyond education to see what is happening in the workforce once women graduate from training programmes like the one Cisco offers. They also pointed to the need to identify gender disparities at an early stage in IT development using statistics that show a large wage gap already exists in the US between men and women in the IT field.

But are there psychological factors too that determine women's involvement with technology?

Kewal Kohli, Regional Vice-President of the Computer Society of India, the largest association of IT professionals in India, has some interesting insights. Having worked in women-specific IT projects and heading a technical documentation company himself that has several women recruits, he has found that women are better than men in communication skills, semantics and other application areas. However, when it comes to plain hardware, they have slower comprehension than men. "But the biggest problem is that women drop out of the job market mid-career, mostly due to domestic pressures and that works to their disadvantage."

In fact, pure statistics on Asian countries also speak the same language. Though in the US for the first time in the history of the Internet women are outnumbering men in Internet usage, that is not the case in Asia. Men represent 78 per cent of all Internet users in Asia, while women account for only 22 per cent. In fact, women are so insignificant in the Asian market that no gender-specific data has been collected by market research companies. "Three-fourths of women have not yet pressed the `power' button to get them into the new economy," according to an Internet-based report.

The report also points out that historically, it is women who function in support roles in corporate offices. They handle the paperwork, the scheduling, filing and routine communications. Today, all these jobs are internet-based and only if women are given the opportunity to learn the required skills, will they be able to retain a stronghold on these jobs.

In fact, women find that the Internet has made business a more level playing field for women. It gives them access to information and networking opportunities more than before, specially in Asian societies where women venture out of the home less than men but head 35 per cent of the small or medium enterprises. With digital empowerment the numbers could very well increase.

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