D. C. Misra Reviewed by Frederick Noronha Co-founder Bytes for All fred@bytesforall

Usha Sharma
Authors press, 2003
E35/103 Jawahar Park, Laxmi Nagar, New Delhi 92
Pp 250, Rs 550, hardback

ICT debates, till date, largely tend to be gender-blind. Amidst all this hype simplified into the catchall phrase of the ‘digital divide’, the concerns and specific problems faced by one half of humanity while trying to leverage ICTs is often overlooked. More so in South

Asia, where, in any case, there are not too many resources being devoted to studying how ICTs affect one-fifth of the planet’s people.

There seem to be just a handful of scholars and gender activisits studying this perspective. Statistics and indepth studies seem hard to come by. In such a context, Usha Sharma’s book gives some general pointers.

“In India,” Sharma reminds us, “all electronic media, ranging from satellite television to e-mail and the Internet, are accessible only to the priviledged classes and cater almost exclusively to their predominantly male information and entertainment needs and desires.” If this is the case, what is the situation with ICTs?

One of the first excluding factor is costs. This, of course, affects all sections of the poor, but to women even more than men. For instance: In Bangladesh, the cost of hooking up to the Internet could feed a family for a year. Elsewhere, beyond the affluent world, the situation is not too different. In Africa, the majority of women have access to IT only at work.

There are some good pointers to place on the agenda of the concerns of women.

Sharma underlines the reality: “The geographic location of public Internet centres also affect women’s access to information technology in developing countries. Women’s mobility is considerably more limited than men’s in most societies. When public Internet centres are located in unsafe neighbourhoods or at a great distance from residential communities, women are less likely to frequent them. Beyond safety issues, women’s IT access can be inhibited when offered in settings and institutions that women are unlikely to frequent.” But relevant, local-level statistics come in short supply here. Sharma points out that gender-specific data is also lacking in terms of ICT and telecommunications. Global figures are easier to come by. Figures, for example, of countries with large absolute numbers of women Internet users — Brazil, with 1 million, China with 6 million and Russia with 4.5 million.

Until we in South Asia are able to define the problem more precisely, it will be difficult to understand better ways of coping with it. For instance, how does Internet usage among women vary across Indian states, and what are the innovative uses it’s already being put to? In Mumbai, and elsewhere, for instance, women journalists have an interesting mailing-list that networks them professinally.

This book also raises issues like women’s access to IT training, illiteracy that hits women worse then men, the growing sex industry on the Net that cuts very differently for women and men, the dominantion of Internet global bodies like ICANN by men, and the fact that women in the Third World continue to be kept ‘out’ of being producers of Internet content, software programs, design, inventions and hardware technology.

Sharma looks at women in the world of ICT-related work. This is more of a description, lacking in both critical analysis and specific details. A little more detailed is her look at the pitfalls of ICT training. (The includes using ICT training to perpetuate traditional roles; equating ICT mastery with masculinity; clustering ICT-trained women in lower-paying technology jobs; and providing additional training as an additional burden on women’s time.)

Sharma offers some useful links for women (and men) interested in gender concerns. One only wishes that these had a more precise set of links (in terms of URLs, and email addresses). Those mentioned include NGONet (credited with being the first to raise links between gender, IT and the Third World in the early 90s’ ). Then, there’s the APC (a network of Internet providers working for social justice), an interesting organisation, we in India have only been able to build slender links with. The Indira Gandhi National Open University( IGNOU) in India, has run a large number of programmes for women.

Likewise, the Network Women in Development Europe (WIDE) is based in Brussels and has 12 national branches. DAWN is the Development Alternatives with Women for a New Era, working out of the Carribean, Latin America and South Asia too. Women Working Worldwide is a coordinating group based in London. The Asia-Pacific Research and Resource Organisation for Women (ARROW) is based in Kuala Lumpur. Women Living Under Muslim Laws is a network based in Montpelier, France and having an active branch in Lahore, Pakistan. ISIS is the International Women’s Information and Communication Service, with centres at Quezon City (Philippines) and Santiago (Chile).

Other pointers — but without detailed links or even URLs — that come up include the UNESCO-founded network of women and men journalists committed to gender equality in the media, called WOMMED/FEMMED. It encourages greater freedom of expression for women and a more balanced access for them to decision-making in the media. Sharma also points to the UNESCO and SID (Society for International Development)-produced booklet, ‘An International Annotated Guide of Women Working on the Net’. A word of appraisal of the strong and weak points of these initiatives, and how far they’ve reached towards their goals, would surely have helped. Plans and projects are one thing; are these really achieving what they set out to? Sharma points out that networking can be “employed” for many purposes — social networking, networking to further one’s business, and networking for political advocacy. She says:

“Worldwide, women are putting IT to work for the movement (for women’s rights and empowerment); communicating among dispersed networks, mobilising action in times of crisis, participating in policy debates and voicing new perspectives. Information and communications have always played a vital role in the women’s movement.”

In it’s pages, we are reminded of the various tools that IT and the Internet offer to women: e-mail, conferencing, the World Wide Web, CD-ROM and diskettes, information gateways and portals, fax servers and fax trees, discussion lists, and connections with the traditional media.

We need to be more clear about what exactly this new technology means to women, or others. Here, this book mentions specific ways in which women’s political empowerment can be enhanced: ending their isolation, giving a voice; as a tool for networking; strengthening women’s participation in the political process; by improving the performance of elected women; improving women’s access to government and its services; for education; and for the dissemination of information (including indigenous knowledge).

Some parts of this work are striken by generalities. For instance: “The well-known Self-Employed Women’s Association (SEWA) in India has done extensive work to assist women in informal markets, and has recently established an ICT programme aimed to increase efficiency of rural micro-enterprise activities.” True, SEWA is a high profile organisation in its own field of work, and is often cited as a case-study, specially at the international level. But it does not necessarily follow that it’s work on ICTs would also be the most innovative. One is more than a bit perplexed at ICT debates focusing more on packaging and built-up reputations, rather than actually useful innovation. This happens in the ICT conference circuit too.

IT and globalisation is also changing women’s work. Sharma points to home-based work and teleworking, one using old technologies, and the other, new, as she puts it. She looks at the “lower ends of teleworking” like data-entry, and says that it would be a “more realistic possibility for large number of women in developing countries”. There’s also data-warehousing and call centres.

Sharma looks at various aspects of these developments. Like, for instance,the fact that entering data doesn’t require tertiary education,

but almost all women in this industry are college educated”. What seems lacking are more critical questions about whether a dependency on such jobs make sense, what’s the implications of doing the backoffice drudgery for the West, and that too for cheap. Even if the deprived citizen of the Third World has few options, these are issues worth considering.

She looks at the role of ICTs in propping up distance education. As would be obvious, women are also getting new opportunities from this new technology, to not just surf but also shape the Net. Says Sharma:

“Women’s sites cover subjects such as gender and sexuality, feminism, women’s health, women in computer science, engineering, women’s studies, women in academia and women in industry”. Once again, specific lists and URLs here wouldn’t have hurt. This book says the obvious when it points out that women are not just stopping with email and browsing, but also looking at online conferences, mailing-lists, networking as a tool to empower female scholars, and the like. ICTs that also get mention include interactive videodisks (IVDs), compact disks-digital audio (CD-DA), photo CDs, digital video interactive (DVI), compact disc interactive (CDIs), video information systems (VIS), electronic books and even the seemingly far-fetched (for us) virtual reality. But by now almost everyone seems to have by now forgotten the potential of that age-old Usenet and its newsgroups ( http://groups.google.com), never mind if these are flooded with porn and spam they’re still rather useful.

Points out Sharma: “Women have less online access than men, for all the usual gender-related reasons — time, money, control, learning opportunities, other commitments, prioritising others’ needs...”

Sharma has culled her information from a variety of sources. Once in a while, one comes across an interesting byte that puts the issue into better perspective. Concerns from a distant continent make sense here too. For instance: “In South Africa, a concern is that IT publications and the IT milieu are concerned only with the top end of the market, faster machines, and more impressive graphics.”

This book seems well argued on the generalities; where it seems to be lacking is in the specificities, case-studies and real-life examples that emerge from South Asia, the region where it is written and published. Dr Usha Sharma, the author, is described as an academic and research scientist. This book, hardback and priced at USD 11, might be a bit hard on the pocket and low on specifics. Specially in a South Asian context. But as it covers a field that often gets little or no attention, it’s probably worth a read.