Women's Digital Inclusion

The internet has great potential to promote women’s digital inclusion and gender equality, one of the pillars of sustainable development. But it can also pose new challenges to women’s rights and personal security, both online and offline.

This briefing, jointly published by the Internet Society and the Association for Progressive Communications (APC), outlines ways in which policy makers can facilitate the internet’s positive potential through an enabling framework for women’s digital inclusion:

•  It urges effective, tangible and measurable action to overcome the digital gender gap in internet access, to ensure that women benefit from the developmental potential of digital inclusion.
•  It encourages a holistic and contextualised approach to overcoming barriers to women’s access to and use of the internet.
•  In doing so, it builds on recommendations contained in the G20 Digital Economy Ministerial Declaration, agreed at Salta, Argentina, in August 2018. It also draws on a number of recommendations made by working groups of the G20, including the Women20 (W20) dialogue held in Paris, France, in May 2018.

Together, these represent key considerations for unlocking access to the internet in support of women’s digital inclusion and have resonance for all initiatives concerned with women’s interests online. Although not the only framework that is available, the G20 recommendations provide a useful basis for considering future action which already has international resonance and support