The information society has largely been driven and shaped by a techno-deterministic vision that obscures its gendered context. It is therefore imperative that the emerging landscape of the information society is anchored within the broader framework of gender equality, especially given its vast public policy implications. This exercise requires gender equality advocates to recognize the urgency of grappling with the nuances of information society developments and steer the discourse to ensure gender-just outcomes.

This publication features a series of papers that represent an early exploration of the challenges and opportunities for
actors committed to gender equality in the information society. It is meant to open up the debates that can pave the way for a sustained engagement of gender activists with one of the most powerful contemporary social phenomena.

Preface:

This collection of papers comes from a seminar organized by IT for Change in April 2005. The impetus for the seminar came from the pressing need to engender the emerging policy discussion spaces concerning the information society, specifically the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS), with feminist perspectives that are rooted in Southern realities.

This required that gender advocates grasp the complexities of the vast and evolving information society arena to bridge analysis and action.

Further, given the extremely peripheral involvement in Phase 1 of WSIS of those Southern feminists who had the rich experience of representing local struggles and interests in global governance fora to assert the rights of and seek gains for the most disadvantaged women in global policy, it was even more critical to mobilize gender perspectives that could highlight Southern agenda in Phase 2 of WSIS.

The seminar ‘Gender Perspectives on the Information Society: South Asia Pre-WSIS Seminar’ was an effort to engage with this task on hand. It was organized by IT for Change, in partnership with Development Alternatives with Women for a New Era (DAWN) and the Centre for Public Policy, Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore. The seminar was supported by UNIFEM and the UNDP Asia-Pacific Development Information Programme.

Given that many feminist activists and scholars in the South Asia region were still uninitiated into the WSIS process, the seminar provided a space to seek their engagement with information society issues – to examine how these issues have been framed, how they link to ‘old’ debates on development and rights and to come up with directions for future engagement. The seminar also sought to encourage the Information and Communications Technology for Development (ICT4D) community, to present gendered perspectives from the ground.

This collection of papers from the seminar (two papers, however, are from contributors who could not be present during the seminar) represent a broad variety of issues and perspectives that are implicated in the wide, and still not well-articulated, arena of gender concerns in the information society. The reader may not find these papers building a clear consensus on the risks, challenges, opportunities and action items vis-à-vis gender in the information society. In a sense, the collection represents the un-reconciled plurality of the discourse and also signifies the nascency of feminist engagements with information society issues, as much as it denotes the necessary heterogeneity of perspectives in areas where critical analysis is emerging. ...

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Edited by Anita Gurumurthy, Parminder Jeet Singh, Anu Mundkur and Mridula Swamy
© UNDP-APDIP 2006

The Asia-Pacific Development Information Programme (APDIP) is an initiative of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) that aims to promote the development and application of information and communications technology for sustainable human development in the Asia-Pacific region.

About the Authors:

Tasneem Ahmar

Tasneem Ahmar is the Director of Uks Research Centre. She is actively involved in designing and organizing seminars, conferences and workshops, conducting research studies, and writing reports on various development issues. She also provides training in gender sensitization. As the executive producer of the Uks Radio Project, she leads a team of four women radio journalists who produce Urdu language radio programmes based on women’s and social issues as part of Uks’ advocacy campaign. Tasneem has participated in several national and international seminars and conferences in and outside Pakistan and has written a number of research papers and articles as well as investigative reports for the English press in Pakistan.

Janardhan Rao Cheeli

Janardhan Rao Cheeli works for the National Academy of Agricultural Research Management, Hyderabad. He is simultaneously pursuing his Ph.D in Communication at the Sarojini Naidu School, University of Hyderabad. His doctoral thesis is on participatory video and community empowerment in India.

Nikhil Dey

Nikhil Dey works with the Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan (MKSS) and the National Campaign for Peoples Right to Information. He has been working with the MKSS since its inception in 1990, along with Shankar Singh and Aruna Roy. He has a degree in law from the University of Delhi. Nikhil Dey has also been actively involved with the Campaign on Right to Food and other human rights organizations.

Anita Gurumurthy

Anita Gurumurthy is a founding member and a director of IT for Change, an NGO located in Bangalore. Anita’s core interests have included research and writing on development, with specific focus on areas such as gender, health, globalization, andICTsand the work of grassroots NGOs particularly on women’s empowerment. She has been actively involved in advocacyaround gender issues at WSIS and is also the regional coordinator of the WSIS Gender Caucus for Asia Pacific. Anita is on the International Advisory Committee of BRIDGE - gender and development information service, and is the author of the BRIDGE Cutting Edge Pack on Gender and ICTs. As a Research Consultant at Indian Institute of Management Bangalore, Anita is also involved in research on public-private partnerships in health delivery.

Heike Jensen

Heike Jensen is a researcher and lecturer at the Department of Gender Studies of Humboldt University in Berlin, Germany, where she also obtained her doctorate. Her teaching and research foci are media theories, media politics and media strategies, women’s movements and women’s organizations, and globalization and global governance.

Heike’s volunteer work is dedicated to promoting women. She is a member of several NGOs, from TERRE DES FEMMES at the national level to the Association of Progressive Communications Women´s Networking Support Program and the Association for Women’s Rights in Development at the global level. In the WSIS process, Heike has worked with the German Civil Society Coordinating Group, the NGO Gender Strategies Working Group and the WSIS Gender Caucus, where she is a member of the Steering Committee. Heike was a civil society representative in the German governmental delegation attending the Geneva and the Tunis summits, and she coordinated the European/North American Regional Conference on Gender and WSIS in 2005.

Ammu Joseph

Ammu Joseph is an independent journalist and author, based in Bangalore, India, and writing primarily on issues relating to gender, children, human development and the media. Her publications include five books: Whose News? The Media and Women’s Issues (co-authored/ edited with Kalpana Sharma); Women in Journalism: Making News; Terror, Counter-Terror: Women Speak Out (co-authored/edited with Kalpana Sharma); Storylines: Conversations with Women Writers; and Just Between Us: Women Speak about their Writing (co-authored/edited with Vasanth Kannabiran, Ritu Menon, Gouri Salvi and Volga).

Radhika Lal

Radhika Lal, a development economist by training, is a Policy Advisor on ICT for poverty reduction and the MDGs with UNDP’s Bureau for Development Policy in New York. Her work involves assisting countries seeking strategic guidance in the areas of ICT4D strategies and fostering the use of such technologies to enhance the impact of initiatives aimed at economic development, poverty reduction and social equity. Prior to working with UNDP, she undertook research, taught economics, and also worked with CSOs on economic policy as well as technology issues.

Kanchan K. Malik

Kanchan K. Malik has been awarded her PhD degree in Communication by the University of Hyderabad and her doctoral work addresses the politics of community radio in India. She is a Guest Faculty in Department of Communication, S.N.School, University of Hyderabad.

Nivedita Menon

Nivedita Menon has taught political science at Delhi University for close to 20 years. She has written on gender and politics and been active in non-party non-funded citizen’s initiatives around democratic rights issues in Delhi. Her latest book, Recovering Subversion: Feminist Politics beyond Law was published in 2004.

Anu Mundkur

Anu Mundkur is pursuing her doctoral degree at the School of Information Studies, Syracuse University. Her doctoral dissertation is titled: Bureaucratic reform through information technology? A case from India. The study combines institutional theory and social shaping of technology theories to understand the development, adoption, use, and impacts of an egovernance system by a city-level authority in India. Anu is also interested in transnational advocacy (issues encompassing the role of civil society in influencing information and communication policy at the international and transnational level) and IT for development (issues related to disparities in access to ICTs, sustainability in use of technology for development).Prior to starting her doctoral studies, Anu worked for six years in the field of development communications with Indian and international NGOs such as VOICES and ActionAid India.

Vinod Pavarala

Vinod Pavarala is a Professor of Communication at the Sarojini Naidu School of Performing Arts, Fine Arts & Communication, University of Hyderabad. His ongoing project, ICTs, Development and Democracy examines how access to ICTs to the poor and marginalized could lead to redefining the public sphere.

Usha Vyasulu Reddi

Usha Vyasulu Reddi, currently Director of the Commonwealth Educational Media Centre for Asia, New Delhi was formerly Professor of Communication and Director, Audio Visual Research Centre, Osmania University. With more than 25 years of experience in teaching production and research communication and educational technology, she has been involved with developments in international and national activities in the planning, design, deployment and evaluation of ICT for education and development. She is recognized as one of the top academics and practitioners in the field of communication in India. Her current work entails the management of an international agency established by the Commonwealth of Learning to address open, distance and technology-enabled education and educational technology needs of public domain institutions in Commonwealth Asia. Catalyzing and encouraging collaborations, capacity building, and providing an information resource centre for the region have been among her activities.

Gita Sen

Gita Sen holds a PhD in Economics from Stanford University and is Sir Ratan Tata Chair Professor at the Indian Institute of Management in Bangalore, India, and Adjunct Professor of Population and International Health at the Faculty of Public Health, Harvard University. She is a development economist whose research focuses especially on gender and development. Her recent work includes research and policy advocacy on the gender implications of globalization and economic liberalization, the gender dimensions of population policies, and the equity dimensions of health. Her published work includes a number of well-known books and articles on gender and development. She is a founding member of the feminist network, DAWN and currently on the Board of Governors of the Institute of Development Studies, Sussex, on WHO’s Global Advisory Committee on Health Research, and UNDP’s CSO Advisory Committee. Among a number of awards and honours, she received the Volvo Environment Prize in 1994, an honorary doctorate from the University of East Anglia in the UK in 1998, and an honorary doctorate in medicine from the Karolinska Institute in Sweden in 2003.

Parminder Jeet Singh

Parminder Jeet Singh is a director at IT for Change. He has spent nearly a decade in government service, where he lead some innovative e-governance initiatives. During this time, in 2001, he co-authored a book, Government@Net: E-governance Opportunities for India. After resigning from the government, he has worked with many ICT4D field projects, as well as in research and advocacy efforts related to information society issues. Parminder has been centrally involved in the WSIS process, where he advocated pro-South positions. At IT for Change, Parminder is the chief coordinator of a field project which aims to bring new ICTs to disadvantaged rural women, and is also the project coordinator for a research and advocacy programme Information Society for the South.

Aruna Sundararajan

Aruna Sundararajan has over two decades of experience working with the Indian Government as part of the Indian Administrative Service. As Secretary of the Department of Information Technology, for the Government of Kerala, in South India, she was involved in the formulation of ICT policies and frameworks including the implementation of multi-sectoral ICT programmes, focusing on community development, capacity building, entrepreneurship and e-governance.

She has overseen the design and execution of flagship ICT4D projects including the IT@School project, which attempts to induct IT into the school curriculum across Kerala, and the unique Akshaya project, one of the largest rural community e-learning and entrepreneurship initiatives of its kind in developing countries, under which 0.6 million rural people have been imparted basic computer literacy. This project was recently awarded the prestigious Golden NICA Award.

Currently, Aruna is heading the Global e-Schools & Communities initiative, an endeavour of the UN ICT Task Force to support the use of ICTs for education and development in India. The initiative focuses on the creative deployment of ICTs for achieving the MDGs.

Mridula Swamy

Mridula Swamy is a graduate from American University with a Masters degree in International Development, specializing in gender and development policy. Working as a Research Associate at IT for Change, she is engaged in a policy research initiative for the UNDP on engendering ICT policies in the Asia Pacific region. She is a part of the WSIS Gender Caucus-IDRC project as the author of the chapter on Women’s Empowerment in the Information Society of South Asia.

In Mahithi Manthana, an ongoing field-level project undertaken by IT for Change along with Mahila Samakhya, Karnataka, she is engaged in the quantitative and qualitative research aspects. She is also involved in a project to localize a handbook on women’s empowerment through ICT-based enterprise activities in partnership with the University of Manchester, UK.

Carol Upadhya

Carol Upadhya is a social anthropologist. She is currently a Visiting Associate Fellow in the School of Social Sciences at the National Institute of Advanced Studies (NIAS), Bangalore. Earlier she was Reader in Sociology at the Department of Post-Graduate Studies and Research at SNDT Women’s University in Mumbai. Her work has focused on the social and cultural transformations brought about by economic development in India. She has also written on theoretical issues in anthropology and the history of anthropology/ sociology in India, and recently completed a research project on land rights in Jharkhand. For the past two years she has been researching various aspects of the IT industry and IT workforce in Bangalore. Her current project, being carried out with Dr A.R. Vasavi at NIAS, is entitled Indian IT Professionals in India and The Netherlands: Work, Culture, and Transnationalism, and is funded by the Indo-Dutch Programme for Alternatives in Development.

Rukmini Vemraju

Rukmini Vemraju, Programme Officer, Commonwealth Educational Media Centre for Asia, Commonwealth of Learning, has a background in communication and educational technology and about 20 years of diverse experience in the field of communication spanning advertising, creative writing, educational product development design, research and project management.

Her current projects include working with community-based organizations to develop local capacities to generate development-oriented content using ICTs, particularly using audio and video. ICT applications for open and distance education like teleconferencing is another interest area. Formerly, she was Professor and Head of Research at TALEEM Research Foundation, Ahmedabad (India) a literary, scientific educational society and trust engaged in social science, media and educational technology research. She has a Masters in Communication and Journalism from Osmania University, Hyderabad, India and is a keen learner of Indian languages. Currently, Rukmini is engaged in working with ICT and development with a special focus on women and technology.

Leelangi Wanasundera

Leelangi Wanasundera is a board member of the Centre for Women’s Research, Sri Lanka. She has previously worked as Head Information and Communication Division, Centre for Integrated Rural Development for Asia and the Pacific in Dhaka, Bangladesh and has been working on gender issues in ICT and other women’s issues.

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