ICT Gender Equality Demanded By 2020

Delegates gathered in Mexico City for the recent Broadband Commission for Digital Development meeting agreed to mandate gender equality in broadband access by 2020. “Women’s access to information and communications technologies (ICTs) and particularly broadband must be made a key pillar of the post-2015 global development agenda,” said Dr. Hamadoun I. Touré, ITU Secretary-General and the commission’s co-vice chair. Helen Clark, chair of the commission’s Working Group on Gender and administrator of the U.N. Development Programme, added, “If we can find ways to close the gender gap in ICT access, we can not only help empower individual women and girls, and their families, but catalyze the kind of inclusive and sustainable development which benefits us all.” The working group wants the Broadband Commission to implement a project “dashboard” to track gender and technology initiatives worldwide, with a report due in September.