International Women’s Day: Gender Equality in the Digital Age
This year’s International Women’s Day is celebrated under the theme ‘DigitALL: Innovation and technology for gender equality’.
Advances in technology have huge potential to address development goals and to further gender equality and inclusion worldwide. But innovation, forward-thinking and creative solutions are needed to ensure that women’s consumer protections are built into new and existing digital spaces.
In this blog, we share the ways consumer advocates and others are championing a digital age that empowers women and girls and contributes towards gender equality worldwide.
A call for gender-inclusive digital innovation
Financial services that invest in women’s inclusion and empowerment
Digital financial services are set to be a catalyst for women’s financial inclusion. The Better Than Cash Alliance stresses the value of digital financial services as an enabler for women’s empowerment, financial independence, and economic security across low- and middle-income countries.
However, risks faced by consumers of digital financial services, such as fraud, cybercrime, data breaches, opaque pricing, and more, are exacerbated for many women, particularly those living in poor or rural areas. This is largely due to the digital divide – whereby women are less likely to have access to digital and online safety education.
Our Fair Digital Finance Accelerator, a network of consumer advocacy organisations in low- and middle-income countries, aims to reduce those inequalities. Of the organisations we work with, 97% actively promote the rights of women. Through our training programme, we make sure the connections between gender equality and fair finance are integrated into consumer associations’ engagements with consumers, regulators and service providers.
Inclusion by design in online marketplaces
In our recent online dialogues with digital experts, speakers shared the ways that exclusionary design can be embedded into digital hardware itself. Take the example of Virtual Reality headsets. Built to male standards, when using early headsets many women reported headaches, sore eyesight and dizziness after using the devices, a result of improperly fitting eyewear. Exclusion by design is particularly pronounced for minority women. Devices are often unable to fit over black women’s hairstyles and cannot be used at all with hijabs and other religious headwear.
Tackling gender-based-violence in online spaces
New technologies, such as smart devices, and digital spaces such as social media or gaming platforms, enable access to our homes and private lives like never before. Women and girls find themselves particularly vulnerable to online safety and digital privacy concerns. According to a 2021 study, more than a third of women have experienced abuse online, with this figure rising to almost half for young women. Importantly, such violence is more frequent against women with minority gender and sexual identities, who have a disability, are racialised, or are socioeconomically disadvantaged.
The issue is that in many countries, regulatory frameworks rarely consider online gender-based violence within existing policy tackling gender-based violence. And where these laws do exist, enforcement is often patchy. In order to protect women’s rights as consumers, comprehensive integration of gender into consumer protection law and policy must be upheld.
Furthermore, the onus is often on the consumer to prevent abuse. Redress mechanisms used by many platforms mean that complaints must be made by the victim themselves, causing further harm. In February, UNESCO’s Internet for Trust conference explored the issue of redress on online platforms, highlighting issues such as easy access to an email address for victims to file a police report.
Consumers International attended UNESCO's Internet for Trust global conference, coming together with governments, regulatory bodies, digital companies and civil society to tackle online disinformation and hate speech.
Building gender into consumer protection - Our work with UNCTAD
In order to protect women’s rights as consumers, we want to see a comprehensive integration of gender into consumer protection law and policy.
The UN Guidelines for Consumer Protection are the bedrock of much of our work at Consumers International. The guidelines recognise the vulnerability of some consumers in regard to economic capacity, level of education and bargaining power. However, no specific recommendations exist for gender.
To bridge this gap, UNCTAD has established a Working Group on Consumer Protection and Gender to which Consumers International is a member. Together, we will explore consumer protection and gender to highlight best practices, and facilitate global knowledge-sharing.
The working group will present recommendations at the seventh session of the Intergovernmental Group of Experts on Consumer Protection Law and Policy. In collaboration with our Members, we gathered global insights into the relationship between gender and consumer rights.
Members from Rwanda, Argentina and elsewhere reported that gender is not reflected in consumer protection regulation, often providing insufficient protections for women or non-binary people. They reported gendered-consumer harms such as harmful advertising, online safety, risks of digital financial services, and barriers to accessing redress mechanisms. They also shared the work they are doing to promote gender mainstreaming in consumer protection policy. Recently, ADELCO (Argentina) published ‘Consumption and Gender Perspective’, as a tool to guide conversations around integrating gender into consumer advocacy. And organisations like CECU (Spain) are breaking down the gender gap by working with women’s associations in rural areas to bring their perspective to CECU’s work and projects, providing training in consumer rights and responsibilities.
The examples shared are just a selection of how consumer advocates are championing consumer protection and gender around the world. This International Women’s Day we are proud to unite with all of those supporting the day – including leaders from across government, business, civil society and academia – amplifying a call for greater gender equality.