Professor Swasti Mitter (formerly Deputy Director of United Nations University Institute for New Technologies, is now Visiting Fellow, CENTRIM, University of Brighton, UK)

The title of my talk is a homage to the book that Robin Mansell edited for UNCSTD on ‘Knowledge Societies’ in l998. The title of her book stresses the role of diversity and context – two themes which, I hope, the women’s forum will emphasise during the sessions on access, empowerment and governance. It is the context alone that turns information into useful knowledge. As the context or boundaries of our lives and livelihoods vary between rich and poor countries, between rural and urban sectors and, not least, between women and men, it becomes pertinent to talk about knowledge societies rather than one uniform and global knowledge society. The aim of the forum is to highlight the challenges and opportunities that women face in participating in the emerging knowledge societies that are based on ‘digitalised’ information which can be transferred across local boundaries with relative ease. ‘Geography is becoming history’.

Women, cultural diversity: the case of healthcare

This transferability of information bodes well for traditionally disadvantaged groups that include women. In most societies, including in poorer ones, the advent of information and communication technologies opens up possibilities of access to a ‘global’ pool of knowledge, so long as potential users have access to adequate infrastructure and possess relevant skills. Information about reproductive health over the internet can, for example, save or improve lives of many women (and men) facing the hazards of AIDS in Asian and African countries. The price of computers, the cost of telephony, lack of skills – they all indeed make it difficult for women (who generally form the majority of the poor) to gain from ‘digitalised’ information on cure, prevention or diagnosis. Yet, communal facilities of infrastructure, and expertise in the use of the internet – as provided in telecentres – could somehow overcome these. The lack of cultural understanding poses a far more insuperable problem in spreading the benefit of ICT. The acceptability of visual representations and text depends much on the tradition and norms of the society. It is the participation of women from a particular locality that is likely to make the content of a website, devoted to reproductive health, culturally acceptable and effective.

Women in the realm of production and innovation

It is not only in the production of content, but also in the sphere of production of technology that women’s presence is necessary for an efficient and equitable knowledge society. I wish to illustrate this with reference to development in the software industry. The current optimism and justifiable enthusiasm over ‘Linux’, I feel, makes it an appropriate time for insisting on women’s presence in the conception, formulation and application, for instance, of software technology. The operating system of Linux is a Unix clone which runs on different platforms and supports a variety of software, most of which is free. Linux is providing a cheap and effective alternative to Microsoft’s operating system. There is thus already affordable technology that can run on older platforms and open up opportunities for disadvantaged groups and poorer countries. Yet, the prospect of addressing women-specific questions in the configuration of software remains remote unless women themselves become visible in the community.

The software industry, by and large, is relatively woman friendly compared with other types of engineering. In India, women constitute nearly 20 per cent of programmers. The figures are comparable in Malaysia and Brazil. Yet, as our work in India and Malaysia shows, women concentrate in the low value added end of the occupation and are less visible in more demanding technical and/or managerial roles. The reasons are not necessarily discrimination. The childbearing role of women often makes it necessary for them to settle for occupations and tasks that are less challenging. This is particularly so as working hours are generally geared to male needs. Given the worldwide shortages of programmers, the women’s forum may find it timely to evaluate new modes of working – such as teleworking – in order to make it possible for women to remain in the career path on a par with men, even when they have a young family. Women’s presence in the realm of production is important, as it contributes towards making innovations that are geared to women-specific needs.

Women and e-commerce

ICT makes the role of distance less significant in organising business and production, particularly for transnational corporate companies. The current trend towards global networking leads to massive relocation of information-intensive service sector jobs from high wage to low wage countries. The relocation is reminiscent of the transference of manufacturing jobs that took place in the seventies and eighties. The trend is particularly visible in areas such as call centres or customer care services, medical transcription work (from the US), clerical and data entry work, Geographical Information Systems or accounting. The resultant trade in business information in fact is a much bigger component of e-commerce than the much publicised on-line retailing. Some developing countries, such as India, are receiving a substantial amount of such relocated outsourced jobs, where salaries of ICT workers are one-tenth of those in the US. A large proportion of these jobs go to women. In the light of these new developments, the women’s forum could initiate a sharing of experiences among countries, such as between India and Sub-Saharan African countries, in order to identify skills that TNCs look for in women employees whilst choosing a host country.

E-commerce and the Informal Sector

Women in software and ICT-enabled services are, by definition, relatively privileged. The growth of the e-economy, potentially offers possibilities for business and self-employment even to women who are not privileged, and are employed in the informal sector of the economy. In Bangladesh, the Grameen Bank’s initiative to empower women, by supplying credit to buy cellular phones, has understandably received attention from development agencies. For some women, the business possibilities of selling telephone services to others in the village has created or augmented their capacity to generate income. But it is difficult to extend the opportunity as there are limits to how much services one can sell in a poor village and to how many people. Women in the informal sector need to be innovative in finding niche markets, in the same way as the corporate sector, in order to participate in e-commerce. As I survey the changing scenario from a woman’s perspective, I feel that women, particularly the non-privileged ones in the informal sector, need market information and business skills as much as hardware, software and connectivity to be able to participate in e-commerce. Representatives of women’s NGOs at this conference may benefit from a dialogue with the donor bodies and the policymakers to identify experts who could make market information available to minuscule women entrepreneurs and help women to get connected to websites. It will parallel the experience of the private sector, which is useful where the trend now is to hire specialised agencies to target the e-market.

Women’s contribution to knowledge

In order to have efficient and ethical ‘knowledge societies’, it will be important to include and respect women’s current and potential contribution to ‘digitised’ knowledge. Barred, as women often are, from formal centres of education and training, women’s knowledge is often contextual, rooted in experience and experiments but non-codified. This form of knowledge is not always amenable to digitalisation. This is in contrast with the ‘textual’, codified knowledge of formal education to which men generally have greater access. Yet, as it is the context, and context alone, that converts information into knowledge, it will be important to ensure that global ‘textual’ knowledge does not erode the role of women’s tacit skills.

There is scope and need for codifying, whenever possible, the tacit and indigenous knowledge of women so that it can be transferred to other communities. Here, the women’s forum needs to address the issue of intellectual property rights over knowledge. In traditional societies, it is women who are major repositories of local knowledge, particularly in the areas of crops, nutrition and indigenous medicines. Unlike individual innovation, such community and traditional knowledge, however, cannot be patented. Yet, when transferred, in codified form, to developed countries, this knowledge could be claimed as an innovation that could be patented by the scientists and/or the corporate sector.

Key mechanism for mainstreaming gender issues

In the light of the discussion so far, we, members of the Women’s Forum, perhaps could ask the partners, in all the three key sessions, to ensure that:

1. The question of women is addressed in the objectives and aims of most GK initiatives;
2. Women are included in sufficient numbers in the global knowledge partnership;
3. The impact on women is accepted as a criterion for assessing the success or failure of GK initiatives.

In summary, all that I want to say is this:

One of the main contributions that the women’s forum could make to this conference is to highlight the significance of context in transforming information into knowledge that enhances the quality of our lives. It may thus help if we women, using our own experiences at home and at work, direct the GK initiatives towards fulfilling the needs and aspirations of our own communities. We can also take the responsibility of locating case studies of successes and failures of women oriented initiatives.

Women, because of their biological and social roles, are generally more rooted than men in the confines of their locality. Hence, women are often more aware than men of the social, economic and environmental needs of their own communities. The strength of women’s voices in the GK partnership is thus likely to reduce ‘information overload’: the ‘rusting tractor syndrome’ equivalent in the knowledge society.

The role of the women’s forum should also be geared to generating awareness of the importance of the ‘woman question’ on the grounds of equity. Asymmetry in social and economic power between men and women means that women often encounter different, and more difficult, access to the benefits of ICT. We can provide the partners with concrete examples.

In order to make a level playing field, we should perhaps urge the partners to aim for ‘targeted access’, in place of ‘universal access’, in their efforts to democratise the benefits of ICT. A move towards equity does not necessarily mean public sector or donor agency subsidy for an indefinite period of time. In an ever-expanding digital economy that is facing acute shortages of requisite business and technical skills, women could redress the skills shortages faced by the private sector – so long as they have initial access to technical and business training, infrastructure and/or credit. This conference, I believe, will be an ideal forum for sharing experiences of the difficulties that societies face in including women in the growing information economy. It will likewise be an appropriate place to discuss the complementary actions that the public and private sector could play in overcoming these.

Finally, I should very much like us women to be aware of the diversity in women’s own perception of the relevance of ICT. It would be rather unstrategic to assume that the needs and visions of all women are the same, and that all women in the developing world view ICT with uncritical enthusiasm. At the ECA conference on ‘African Women and Development: Investing in our Future’ in Addis Ababa in April l998, the Ugandan Vice President, Dr Specioza Wandira-Kazibawe, voiced the concern of many. She passionately emphasised Africa’s needs to get its priorities right by meeting basic requirements, such as food and shelter, before addressing what she described as somewhat esoteric concerns such as ICT

There is scepticism about the benefits of ICT also from those who face redundancy from implementation of the technology. The women handloom weavers of India, faced with foreign competition and the challenges of CAD/CAM, ask: Is there a future for us and our children in the new society?

In the euphoria of optimism, the women’s forum should not forget the plight of those who are left behind.