The Journal of Community Informatics: Gender in Community Informatics

Community Informatics and Gender
Michael Gurstein, Ph.D.
Editor-in-chief, The Journal of Community Informatics
gurstein@gmail.com

Issues of gender are at the very heart of community informatics just as they are at the very heart of community and communities. Gender-based differences in opportunities for access, differences in required uses, differences in strategies for appropriation are all central to an understanding of how ICT can enable communities.

These issues become particularly evident in many Less Developed Countries where ICT access and use are filtered through the lens of local culture, often one where the position of women and girls is highly determined and highly structured—in very many cases much more than that of men and boys. Issues of appropriate behaviour, maintaining modesty, gender-determined economic activities, gender-based social relations all have their direct impact on the practice of ICT in communities. Very often this is to the detriment of opportunities for women and girls to access computers and the Internet, to obtain training, to leverage the use of the Internet for personal and family benefit and so on.

This filtering of community informatics through the lens of local culture and practice reverberates at all levels within a community informatics framework. The design of public Internet access at the local level in many LDC’s requires that attention be paid to local prohibitions concerning women’s movements and women’s attendance at events with males not members of their immediate family.

In the design of CI applications the specific areas of women’s prescribed conventional area of family and community responsibility—child care, family maintenance and food preparation, caring for the elderly and sick need to be taken into account. As well there needs to be a recognition that in addition to these activity areas, in many instances women have further responsibilities to directly support family income.

At the same time recognition must be given, as noted above, that women may have had less opportunity for conventional education as well as for computer access and training than boys or men. In these cases compensatory policy measures including design features may be required and a fine line drawn between adjusting CI initiatives to existing and often highly discriminatory cultural practices and finding ways to push the boundaries in those instances where women and particularly younger women wish to realize these.

Equally, it can be realized that access to computing and the Internet may be the basis for significant opportunities for change and for opening up of economic and personal areas for employment, professional training and development and for expression (and even it should be mentioned, for emotional release and the development of social relationships). In many instances these can lead to self-development for individuals and even cultural advance at the local level and particularly as younger women gain an education. Also, it may in many instances, through access to some computing and Internet skills, empower especially younger women to seek additional employment opportunities locally but also through urban migration.

Overall it will be seen that no successful community informatics can be realized without responding to the challenges that culturally presented gender relations introduce at the local level.

I am truly delighted at the range of research and cultural and other contexts that are represented in this special double issue of JoCI. This is the first such double issue and it was decided to do this since we could not reasonably fit all of the extremely valuable and interesting contributions into a single issue.

Thanks to everyone who contributed to this and particularly to Anita Gurumurthy who had the vision and the persistence to carry this through even as she was making a huge contribution to her own agency IT for Change, her research work through the Community Informatics Institute in Mysore and her role as a wife and mother to her lovely twin daughters.

Gender in Community Informatics (Special Double Issue)

Table of Contents

Editorial

Editorial: Community Informatics and Gender
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Michael Gurstein
 

Gender in Community Informatics : Guest Editorial for the special issue on Gender and Community Informatics
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Anita Gurumurthy
 

Articles

89.1 FM: The Place for Development: Power shifts and participatory spaces in ICTD
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Revi Sterling, Sophia Huyer
 

Gender digital equality in ICT interventions in health: Evidence from IDRC supported projects in developing countries
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Kathleen Flynn-Dapaah, Ahmed Tareq Rashid
 

Women Forge Ahead in India: Internet and the Public Forum
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Kavita Karan, Dr. Rohit Raj Mathur
 

Technicians, Tacticians and Tattlers: Women as Innovators and Change Agents in Community Technology Projects
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Helen McQuillan
 

Economic and Social Empowerment of Women Through ICT: A Case Study of Palestine
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Khalid Said Rabayah
 

Women at Work and Home: New Technologies and Labor among Minority Women in Seelampur
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Sreela Sarkar
 

Gender and GIS: Mapping the Links between Spatial Exclusion, Transport Access, and the Millennium Development Goals in Lesotho, Ethiopia, and Ghana
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Wendy M Walker, Shalini P Vajjhala
 

Village Phone Program, Commodification Of Mobile Phone Set And Empowerment Of Women
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Quamrul Alam, Mohammad Abu Yusuf, Ken Coghill
 

The Digital Divide and Gender: A Survey of Environmental Community Organizations in Perth, Western Australia
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Subas Prasad Dhakal
 

Case Studies

Cultivating the Women on Farms Gathering Community: A Digital Approach
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Natalie Lee-San Pang
 

Internet, power and politics: gender & ICTs in the movement against CAFTA
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Margarita Salas
 

Rural e-governance: Exploring the gender gaps and its impact on women(A case study of e-gram suraj scheme of Chhattisgarh State of India)
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Anupama Saxena
 

Notes from the field

Creating Community, Rejecting Community: Migrant Women in Beijing
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Elisa Oreglia
 

Notes and cases from the field (practitioners)

Gender Experiences in IT@School, an ICT enabled education project of Kerala, India
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P R Raji, Arun M
 

Reports

Engendering ICTs: Scope for Empowering women, with special reference to India
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Dilip Dumar Ghosh,