News Feature

Queen Noor on Using Technology to Empower Women

September 22, 2003 — CIO — Technology has become a powerful force for transforming economic life, but it is also having an increasingly powerful impact on social and political conditions around the world. In particular, the Internet has expanded dramatically the reach of nongovernmental organizations and humanitarian activists. Not only are these groups better able to mobilize the masses, but the Internet’s instantaneous nature also enables them to more effectively exert pressure and influence decision making at all levels.

In particular, groups of women in different parts of the world are beginning to voice their concerns and expand their influence on critical issues within governments and decision-making bodies that traditionally have not incorporated their perspectives. This is critical to our efforts to combat poverty and hunger and promote sustainable development, conflict prevention and recovery.

While on the one hand it is important to work within political structures in order to elect more women to parliaments and to ensure that they are more present in decision-making bodies, new technologies provide an alternate means by which women can network more effectively and be active participants in the social, political and economic fabric of their societies.

Though the possibilities are enormous, the technology gender gap remains wide. Around the world, the number of women making use of the Internet is relatively small. Only 22 percent of all users in Asia are women; the number in Latin America is about 38 percent. And in the Middle East, only 6 percent of users are women. My region has both the lowest rate of Internet access for women and the fewest women involved in economic and political life. The challenge and opportunity in the Middle East, then, is to utilize these technologies to accelerate the pace of development. But public and private institutions must have the political will to make the technology available and to properly train women to use it.

Throughout the world, most women using information technology have minimal training. They lack the skills necessary to become future IT leaders, programmers, software designers and entrepreneurs, and instead are often relegated to low-level jobs, doing little more than data entry. Even in the United States, female representation in mid- to upper-level IT jobs is still quite low. If we can redress this imbalance, we might be able to reduce the conditions of inequity that exist globally on all levels of society and help to promote a more stable, peaceful world.

Let’s take the Middle East. Sadly, the recent "Arab Human Development Report" notes that more than half the women in the Middle East are illiterate. In addition, a significant proportion of women in the region live in rural areas, and most technology is concentrated in the cities among high-income groups and more privileged classes. The programs being developed to change that are going to take some time. But there is great potential.