A recent study reveals women in India are less likely to use mobile internet services than men. We speak to experts to understand why this inequality has become the status quo and what lies ahead
The birth of the internet in 1983 heralded a million possibilities—the promise of a digital world without borders, where one could navigate the vagaries of desire through desktops and bulky CPUs, and where information would be free from the shackles of tiny little boxes guarded by men.
Gradually, mega corporations pierced through the utopia the internet promised. Even today, visuals of a young Bill Gates or Jeff Bezos operating their start-ups from a basement garage are considered inspirational. But where were the women? And where are the women now, more than half a century later?
According to the ‘India Inequality Report 2022: Digital Divide’ released by the non-profit organisation Oxfam India earlier this week, Indian women are 15 per cent less likely to own a mobile phone and 33 per cent less likely to use mobile internet services than men. The report had another startling observation, which may not surprise: Women constitute only one-third of internet users in India.
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The lack of access to the internet has a chilling effect on women’s autonomy, even as they find ways of making their presence felt online. Image: Pexels
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What do we lose then, individually and as a society, if women cannot access the internet? Image: Pexels
India fares poorly within Asia, too. How can such a massive chasm exist despite the many efforts to go digital? The report acknowledges that “despite registering a significant (digital) growth rate of 13 per cent in a year, only 31 per cent of the rural population uses the Internet compared to 67 per cent of their urban counterparts.”
God of small things
What do we lose then, individually and as a society, if women cannot access the internet? Nishtha Satyam, head of office for Timor-Leste in UN Women (the United Nations entity dedicated to working towards gender equality and women’s empowerment), and former deputy country representative for UN Women in India, Bhutan, the Maldives and Sri Lanka, tells The Established that this chasm needs to be viewed through a wider lens.
“This has much to do with the ownership of technology and how information and disinformation work around us,” she says. “What we consume and from whom we consume dictates how information is produced and disseminated because we live in a world where more than 40 per cent news and information is user-generated and not from authentic sources.”
To extrapolate further, Satyam says the likelihood of women being exposed to disinformation increases manifold because they don’t have wider access to the many facets of the internet—this percolates into decision-making on multiple levels, too.
“IT ALL COMES DOWN TO THE FACT THAT BOTH MEN AND WOMEN LACK THE DIGITAL LITERACY ON HOW THEY CAN INTERACT WITH EACH OTHER AND SAFEGUARD THEMSELVES”
Shivani Singh
“Men don't make decisions about our nutrition, clothing and which school to send their children to,” she adds, “and if they don’t have the internet to educate themselves and make informed decisions, it impacts all of us because it’s largely women who take such decisions that impact us, including voting.”
Shape of the internet
In many ways, our public spaces dictate who gets to access them and in what ways. While various urban development theorists have suggested how our public spaces, such as park benches or train seats, have not been designed keeping women in mind, does the same apply to the internet, too? Is the internet’s design inherently exclusionary and disadvantageous to women?
“We have had cases like the Sulli Deals (where pictures of Muslim women were up for auction) or sharing of sexually explicit imagery on social media that show us how the internet is not built to uphold women’s safety,” says Shivani Singh, the former chief of staff at the Internet Freedom Foundation.
However, Singh clarifies that the internet’s design is only one side of the coin, and it’s also incumbent upon us to consider the literacy of the people who use it. “It all comes down to the fact that both men and women lack the digital literacy on how they can interact with each other and safeguard themselves.”
The divide between men and women in how they access the internet is not simply a digital divide. Singh says that most women lack the financial resources to access smartphones, healthcare and education. The internet, in that context, is just another aspect of women’s large-scale exclusion.
Fixing the gap
While a multifaceted problem such as this requires multifaceted solutions, the approach to remedy it needs to be slightly more holistic. The lack of access to the internet has a chilling effect on women’s autonomy, even as they find ways of making their presence felt online.
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According to the ‘India Inequality Report 2022: Digital Divide’ released by the non-profit organisation Oxfam India earlier this week, Indian women are 15 per cent less likely to own a mobile phone and 33 per cent less likely to use mobile internet services than men. Image: Pexels
“There are many girls in colleges from rural and semi-urban areas who claim not to have an Instagram or Facebook account, but they do have accounts without their pictures and names. They operate in stealth mode,” says Srishti Bakshi, a women’s rights advocate who recently embarked on a 3,800-kilometre-long journey on foot across India to bring attention to gender sensitisation and whose recent Tedx talk covered breaking gender barriers.
Bakshi says that in this context, women using the internet in stealth mode is not necessarily a bad thing because they are at least consuming information. But operating stealthily, what women can or cannot do is still dictated by society. “Women don’t have access to the internet first because their brothers and fathers beat them out to it, assuming that men will use the internet to enhance their skill set. For women, it’s a question of whether they need it at all,” she says.
According to Bakshi, the various government programmes to tackle this lack of access need to be purpose-driven, not just relegated to women using the internet. She cites the example of the landholding and consolidation exercises in Telangana, where the government handed out smartphones to women to record and measure crops and land after conducting a mass training exercise to demonstrate it, bringing women online for a defined activity and thereby attempting to reduce the digital divide.
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