Gender Inequality in Workplace

According to the blog in consecutive weeks, most of the people at least had encounter once regarding to issue of gender inequality in lifetime especially to female. Regardless of the factor about culture, education even entertainment, most of the women usually will experience gender inequality of treatment in life. Nowadays, Information and communication technology (ICT) has an important role in the world since all of us are in the information age era. ICT has involving in our daily life such as use it in the internal interest even in workplace sector. (Ekaputri, n.d.) Most of the people are using ICT products, ranging from mobile phones, digital TVs through to personal computers and the World Wide Web. Therefore, as the last post in this week, we will explore more about how the gender inequality in workplace regarding ICT.

First of all, there are a lot of gender bias and discrimination in the workplace. Research has found that women are more frequently face limitations and even harassment in the workplace than men. Women received gender discrimination, for example women are often being excluded from company events, they being labeled as “bossy” and "too aggressive". Women feel that they have fewer opportunities and felt excluded from key social or networking events because of their gender (Turner, 2016). Although some of the women are being treated in equal or higher ranking jobs than men but “unconscious bias" still penetrates in the workplace and hence limiting women's opportunities. From the ancient times to the present, most of the people believe that women cannot be competent in higher position in workplace even the work involve used of ICT tools. Female often been discriminate as women have to place in the home rather than leave home for work. Most of the company usually won’t employ married women as their worker, it is because of they think that they will take leave when menstrual period, pregnant and even childbirth. There is a short maternity leave in Malaysia given to women when they after give births, they can get paid leave in a month of maternity and their employer cannot fire them as well.  Pregnant women who work in environment full with electronic device for a long period time, they will be affected by work stress or even radiation, and this will cause fetus premature birth or grow incomplete. Therefore, companies prefer to hire male workers rather than female workers.

Besides, most of the employers think that women are not techno-savvy as men and always rely on men to help them when it comes to ICT for example like setting up their internet connection and internet access. Some of the companies prevent majority women access to internet at work due to there is a common belief in their lack of competent computer knowledge or training and fear of technology which limited them to use ICT even when they have access to the technology. For example, some of my female friends and even myself were called as computer idiot by some of the male friends, it is because we are not being expected like men who often play online games and explore the function of computer. In gender-role socialization, most of the people agree that men have support from IT training more than women and most of them are consider as techno-savvy therefore possessing certain natural skills that enable them to perform better in technology compared to women. For instance, in Jamaican, men are expected to help women for set up their computers and Internet connection at home even workplace, whereas women perform less demanding consumer-related activities in relation to ICTs. Most of them were agreed that it is unfeminine for a women to perform certain IT-related roles that are considered masculine (Muturi, 2005). Since women were acknowledge lack of adequate to computer knowledge, so companies have to develop online training programs on technical and soft skills needed in the ICT, also use a variety of media tools to publicize the current information on the ICT sector for female employees.

Furthermore, pay gap also consider a bigger problem on gender inequality in Malaysia. Women in our country are normally drawing much smaller wages than their male counterpart. According to the gender-related development index report, income earned by Malaysian women are less than half (47.2%) of men’s income. As a matter of fact, the gender wage gap in Malaysia is still relatively high compared to the surrounding countries such as Thailand (61.2%) and Singapore (51.4%) where the after-tax salary for women in these countries surpass more than half of men’s income (chaynee, 2006). Lower salary seems to be a big problem in workplace. Based on the research of Ginste (2015), she states that 94 % partially or fully agree that men have an advantage when it comes to pay. In Malaysia, there are many employers made hiring or salary decisions based on the worker's gender, this consider a gender inequality. In our society, we still see men are dominating the senior management roles rather than women. Many gender stereotypes toward women are too obvious, people typically associate with leadership are always masculine not feminine, because most of them believe women are basically perceived as communal (caring, communicative & encouraging) (Aynsley, 2015), women don’t have the power and controlling force to govern their subordinates, department or even an organization appropriately. Women work in ICT sector is not to be excepted, also many people think that they cannot done well in this field.

In conclusion, gender discrimination is deeply rooted in our mind and perception. Gender biases actually affect both sexes, it is powerful but very subtle and invisible barriers for women. In this few years, there are a lot of country genuinely start to respect and not to deprecation to women, have to change the mindset regard to traditional roles of men and women, eliminating discriminatory practices in workplace, they know that women also can done ICT jobs same as men. The fight against gender inequality must go on, especially in Malaysia. Government play an important roles to take serious action on these issues and narrow down the gender gap in workplace. The government has to made good on its promise and been consistent in its efforts to improve the status of women in Malaysia. Women also have to access frequently to education and training in order to created greater opportunities for participate in the labor market. As long as provide more opportunities to women access to ICT sector, cultivate them to access internet and technology, I believe that Malaysia will reduce poverty, promoting sustainable development and building good governance in the future.

Reference:

Aynsley, B. (December, 2015). THE PROMISE OF DIVERSITY GENDER EQUALITY IN THE ICT PROFESSION. Retrieved March 25, 2016, from http://acs.org.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0003/87681/ACS-Gender-Equality-FINAL.pdf

Ginste, H. (June 16, 2015). What women (really) think? Retrieved March 25, 2016, from http://across-technology.com/what-women-really-think/

Muturi, N. (2005). CHALLENGES TO ACCESS AND USE OR ICTS. Gender Empowerment through ICTs: Potential and Challenges for Women in the Caribbean, 133-146. Retrieved March 24, 2016, from file:///C:/Users/O.K/Downloads/Dialnet-GenderEmpowermentThroughICTsPotentialAndChallenges-3664681.pdf.

Turner, S. (January 20, 2016). Gender inequality in the workplace goes beyond the "pay gap. Deseret New. Retrieved March 25, 2016, from http://newsok.com/article/5473647

How Does The Advertising Industry Empower Gender Equality

Rise of awareness on equity is intensively increasing in world now. More and more societies demand for equal rights and power, which leads to numerous transformations of dictatorship or patriarchal governmental system and policies. Equity established on the foundation of “empowerment”, whereby power must be able to be transferred to other group or person, but not the absolute privilege of any specific people in a power structure. Besides, at the expense of the powerful ones or so-called “zero-sum”, power shall be able to be shared to the less powerful ones with mutual agreement and collaboration (Page & E. Czuba, 1999; Kreisberg, 1992). Hence, empowerment simply means a social process in which the powerful ones endow authority and preserve the rights of the less powerful ones.

This article focuses on the issue of gender empowerment on female, by discussing the phenomenon and development of equality on gender. Gender empowerment grants women with the rights to destine their own lives, by enabling them to set own goals, make decisions and demand that they deserve, and also request necessary support from the society and state (Institute of Development Studies, 1997). In order to have a comprehensive understanding on this concept, this present discourse would discuss on multi-level aspects that are related to gender empowerment namely personal and collective dimensions.

At the level of personal, individual’s knowledge on self-worth and confidence and ability to reconstruct current power structure and resist oppression is measured (Rowland, 1997). It is very important for an individual to evaluate their own status on gender equality. One’s attitude regarding the treatment that they get because of their gender and the will to create a change is critically important for gender empowerment to take place. Sadly, the responses from the women that reflect their knowledge and reluctance towards gender inequality are not optimistic. Track back to 10 years before, in India, women seem to have confirmed to the discriminatory norms as 30.4% India population experienced physical violence, 8.2% experienced sexual violence and 13.6% encountered emotional violence (losing rights to make decision for oneself and family) from spouse and they deemed it as “husband right” (Sunita & Gupta, 2006).

9 years past, the situation seems to have no great improvement on the issue of gender equality.  According to a global report, “Attitudes to Gender”, whereby around the world, women still getting income that is 33% lesser than men; each year 700 million women experiencing physical and sexual violence; out of 774 illiterate adults, 516 of them are women; and women only have 19% of board seats in global businesses. In Britain, it was recorded more women than men agreed that the primary role of a wife is to take care of her husband, while 74% of Middle East respondents also answered so, and 54% of them thought that home is the place for women, while 48% of them thought that women expressing firm views in public is inappropriate (Dahlgreen, 2015). Scholars and politicians in 20 years ago had already pin-pointed out individual awareness and change as the prior criteria for social change and gender empowerment (Wilson, 1996). However, the thinking of some societies today still remained conservative and prohibits improvement to take place. Though the idea of gender equality is globally popularized, but the inequalities are subtly acknowledged in most societies’ norm.

Despite the majority’s awareness on the importance of gender equality is not prevalence enough, the iconic people from the minority did not lose their momentum in combating the gender discriminatory oppression. Emma Watson, a British actress and model, made good use of social media and advertising channel, cheered for gender equality during the past International Women’s Day. She provided statistics and facts on the loss of lives due to gender inequality and discrimination in the wars happened in 20^th century and her saying was then being broadcasted through internet, TV and newspapers (Linda, 2016).

Then, she also launched a feminist book club named, “Our Shared Shelf”, which could be accessed through the online book platform and social networking sites, to inculcate gender empowerment message.

More than that, Emma Watson also rendered her support to United Nation (UN)’s “HeForShe” gender empowerment campaign, by playing the role of ambassador and delivered mind-provoking speech that highlighted the roles of men in empowering gender equality (UN Women, 2016). Her speech was then intensively tweeted in twitter and shared in Facebook and Youtube, which earned her quite a number of accolades and some critiques at the same time.

Right after her speech was virally discussed in the social networking sites, 9 other celebrities then backed up Emma by republishing her speech and publicly prepared write up and took photos that support her campaign (Shaunna, 2016). Another issue rose by a female Hollywood star, Jennifer Lawrence, who is also an Oscar Award winner, where she openly expressed her anger in her essay to the media on the pay gap that happened between her and her male co-stars. Her writing with disappointment and anger, stressed on how unedifying gender inequality is now happening in the world now, in which talent or ability is ranked secondary than gender (Smith, 2015).

Hence, we can observe how these by public figures at their individual level could stand up and fight for the chance to empower both gender. Perhaps, their action might not bring all positive feedbacks, but at least they ignite discussion on gender inequality, which is essentially needed to emphasize the seriousness of this issue and urge for a change for gender empowerment.

Recently, we are able to see more and more advertising and social media industries take the lead to make a difference for women by creating a culture of “femvertising”. One of the significant works would be Dove’s decade-old Real Beauty campaign on social media called ‘Dove Real Beauty Sketches | You’re more beautiful than you think’, which ask people to describe their own look and an artist without seeing them in person would draw their portrait based on their description. After that, Dove will invite those people’s friends to describe again their friend’s look and the artist will draw their portrait again based on the description. The result surprised those people who described themselves, because the drawing that based on the description from their friends and the description from themselves are not compatible, because they looked much more beautiful than they described. This advertisement aimed to inspire women that they should live more confidence and be proud to show their beauty as a woman (Heather, 2013).

Then, Pantene also in arouse public’s attention with a social media campaign called “#ShineStong” with a viral publicity of their short film titled “Sorry, Not Sorry” on social networking sites to urge women challenge current gender unjust and discrimination. Last but not least, a big success earned by #LikeAGirl from Always advertiser, who asked adults to do some physical actions like a girl, and the adult did all the actions in a weak and embarrassed manner. However, when the advertiser asked some young girls to do the same tasks, those girls in contrast ran do it fast and hard. This public service advertisement gained more than 85m views and inspired people that being a girl does not mean weak and vulnerable, but strong and outstanding (Nosheen, 2015).

In conclusion, through the lead of advertising industry, knowledge on gender empowerment is widely shared and stimulate people’s mind from worldwide. However, collective action like this would still need the help and effort from individual to take the step in embracing gender empowerment and makes gender equality become the universal norm. If not together, how do we achieve? 

Reference:

Dahlgreen, W. (2015). YouGov  Global report: attitudes to gender. YouGov: What the world thinks. Retrieved 14 March 2016, from https://yougov.co.uk/news/2015/11/12/global-gender-equality-report/

Heather,. (2013). Dove's 'real beauty sketches' ad deserves some praise. The Guardian. Retrieved 14 March 2016, from    http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/apr/20/dove-real-beauty-sketches-ad-women-perfection

Kreisberg, S. (1992). Transforming power: Domination, empowerment, and education.      Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.

Linda, Q. (2016). Emma Watson: More lives are lost due to gender discrimination than      in all 20th century wars. Politifact. Retrieved 14 March 2016, from     http://www.politifact.com/global-news/statements/2016/mar/15/emma-watson/emma-watson-more-lives-are-lost-due-gender-discrim/

Nosheen,. (2015). Femvertising: how brands are selling #empowerment to women. The     Guardian. Retrieved 15 March 2016, from http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2015/oct/12/femvertising-branded-feminism

Page, N., & E. Czuba, C. (1999). Empowerment: What Is It?. Journal Of Extension, 37(5)..

Shaunna,. (2016). 9 Celebrities Who Are Publicly Supporting Emma Watson's Gender Equality Campaign. MTV News. Retrieved 17 March 2016, from http://www.mtv.com/news/1939988/emma-watson-heforshe-campaign-celebrities-tweet-support/

Smith, N. (2015). Jennifer Lawrence expresses anger at Hollywood's gender pay gap. the  Guardian. Retrieved 17 March 2016, from http://www.theguardian.com/film/2015/oct/13/jennifer-lawrence-hollywood gender-pay-gap

Sunita & Gupta. 2006. Gender Equality and Women’s Empowerment in India. National   Family Health Survey (NFHS-3), India, 2005-06. Mumbai: International Institute  for Population Sciences; Calverton, Maryland, USA: ICF Macro.

Wilson, P. (1996). Empowerment: Community economic development from the inside      out. Urban Studies, 33(4-5), 617-630.

Gender Inequality: Entertainment (ICT)

Information and communication technology (ICT) has affected a lot of field. One of the examples is the topic that we posted last week – Education. Today, we will discuss about entertainment. Entertainment was developed from our cultures, and it was evolved by following the improvement of technology (Bates & Ferri, 2010). For instance, the traditional drama which the actors perform on the stage evolved to drama nowadays which used of the technology record down.

       Nowadays, ICT is important for us as well as for the society, and it has changed the entertainment as it makes the entertainment become more enjoyable, convenient, easy and popular. Almost every types of entertainment were affected by the ICT (Kimathi, n.d). There have a lot of types of entertainment such as drama, movie, game, dance and so on. Among of those entertainment, film or movie, drama, music and game are actually get almost full benefits from the ICT and became mainstream. For example, the audiences can watch movie or drama from internet instead of go to cinema or movie store to buy it. It helps the entertainment industry to gain profit by using internet to reach the new market (Kimathi, n.d). In other word, ICT can helps to reach a large amount of people due to the usage of the internet has become heavier than before. While talking about the entertainment and film, it reminds us of an issue that raised by several celebrities from Hollywood. Jennifer Lawrence, an Oscar winner of 2012 was raised an issue about gender pay inequality (Smith, 2015). She claimed that she is being paid less than her male co-actor even though she is an Oscar winner. Except Lawrence, there have other many celebrities complained about the gender inequality treated by the industry. Thus, today we are going to discuss the gender inequality in entertainment, and if you ask me does the gender inequality treatment still existing in the entertainment? My answer will be definitely yes although now is in 21^st century and the gender are more equalize than before.

First of all, film or movie is becoming an important entertainment in our life, and it is a big business and industry nowadays. However, most of the film are existing gender inequality. According to Zurko (2013), he investigated the gender inequality in film from the top 500 films with high budget which were produced from 2007 to 2012.

In the result, we can see that there was only 30% of speaking character are women which means in other word, there have more than 60% of speaking character are actually men. Here we can know that women are playing less important role in the high budget film, and the industries are more focus on men. In fact, women are particularly concentrated in film genre with smaller budget such as romantic, comedy, drama and music, compared to film genre with large budget such as action, sci-fi and horror (Erigha 2014). A very obvious example will be the transformers series. Megan Fox as the leading actresses in the movie however she only be given very less script compare to Shia Lebeouf, the leading actor of the movie. Not only women play less important role, also they have to act sexually on the screen. According to the statistic, 28.8% of actresses wore revealing clothes and 26.2% of actresses have to get partially naked. It showed many of actresses have to act sexually or exposed their body more compare to men. It is due to woman has been stereotyping as a “sex object”, when the sexy body appears in a movie, it can helps to attract audiences to watch it (Chaudhry, Shehzad & Mohyuddin, 2014).

While in Malaysia, there is different case with the above cases. Issues of gender inequality in Malaysia film are not relating to body exposes, its due to Malaysia is a country that declared Islam as the state religious. From the Quran, females are not allowed to expose their "awrah" which intimate parts of their body. Thus, the local movie that consists over sexy will be banned by the government. However, according to Azmawati (2013), gender inequality still exists in local film. She stated an example of local film named “Ombak Rindu”. In the movie, it portrayed as a wife have to obey to her husband despite suffering in domestic violence. It featured woman as weak, submissive and loyal to his abusive husband and this is what a good wife have to do because of the cultural factors. When talking about domestic violence, there have plenty of movies or dramas performed domestic violence on women.  No matter what language it is, domestic violence on women such as rape scene, beating scene and murder scene by often their husband or boyfriend are frequently exists in the film or drama (Lorber, 2010).

On the other hand, pornography was becoming more mainstream and more hard-core. From the helps of the ICT, people are able to watch it through internet easily, and it made the pornography become a large industry which earns 24 billion USD globally (Crabbe & Corlett, 2010). And yes, gender inequality does exist in pornography as well. According to Crabbe & Corlett (2010), along with the popular of pornography, the industry was demanded to produce more aggressive pornography which including violence into the scene. In those scenes, mostly men are dominant and women are submissive and it delivers the mind set that women are sex object. Therefore, it could makes the young generation expects that girls are open and willing to fulfill the demand from the guys without any hesitation.

           In conclusion, although we are living in 21^st century, and gender is getting lesser after the being females are educated. However, gender inequality is actually lasts longer than our expectation. As we know, ICT is a very powerful tool which can reach many people at the same time, thus, those issues that I discussed above keep on happen, the gender inequality or sexist message will reach many people due to the power of ICT, in the other word, it is actually helping to promote the gender inequality. It will cause the new generation or younger people to have a thought on this issue. Meanwhile, I personally disagree against those gender inequality issues that I have mentioned above. Furthermore, I think that those act should be prohibit. In my opinion, although man is physically more powerful than woman however it does not means that man will be dominant as according to the culture. Once women are educated they may probably stronger than what men have done. Thus, we human should respect on each sex instead of treat inequality.

Reference:

Lorber, J. (2010) Gender Inequality: Feminist Theories and Politics. Retrieved from http://poliscifi.pbworks.com/f/lorber_feminisms_2010.pdf

Crabbe, M & Corlett, D. (2010) Eroticising Inequality: Technology, pornography and young people. Retrieved from http://www.awe.asn.au/drupal/sites/default/files/Crabbe%20Corlett%20Eroticising%20Inequality.pdf

Erigha, M. (2015) Race, Gender, Hollywood: Representation in Cultural Production and Digital Media’s Potential for Change. Sociology Compass 9/1, p 78-79.

Azwan Azmawati, A (2013) Media and gender in Malaysia: An endless battle. Media Asia ( Asian Media Information & Communication Centre), 40(3), p 211-214.

Chaudhry, W, Shedzad, Z & Mohyuddin, A (2014) Women Body Exposure as an Entertainment in Pakistani Films: A Synoptic Survey of Cinemas in Rawalpindi. Journal of Gender & Social Issues, 13(2), p 63-82.

Kimathi, K. (n.d.) Impact of ICT in Education, Entertainment, Development, Governance/Politics & Industry. Retrieved from https://www.academia.edu/5066850/IMPACT_OF_ICT_IN_EDUCATION_ENTERTAINMENT_DEVELOPMENT_GOVERNANCE_POLITICS_AND_INDUSTRY

Bates, S & Ferri, A.J. (2010) What’s Entertainment? Notes Toward a Definition. Studies in Popular Culture. Retrieved from http://pcasacas.org.seanic11.net/SiPC/33.1/33.1.pdf#page=9

Smith, N. M. (2015) Jennifer Lawrence expresses anger at Hollywood’s gender pay gap. Retrieved from http://www.theguardian.com/film/2015/oct/13/jennifer-lawrence-hollywood-gender-pay-gap

Zurko, N. (2013) Gender Inequality in Film. Retrieved from https://www.nyfa.edu/film-school-blog/gender-inequality-in-film/

Gender Inquality in Education (ICT)

Last week in our blog we talked about how the cultural factor effect the gender empowerment in information and communication technology (ICT), so for the second week and second post we will be discussing about how the gender empowerment effect the education in ICT.

In todays modern technology world, technology have already become one of the important tools in our life, and technology have become a necessary gadget for living. The main reason is because of the technology is a gateway for us to access world wide web and enable us to learn or have higher education through online. Within these higher educations, virtual learning environments (VLE), learning management system (LMS), web-based trainings (WBT) and other Electronic-learning (E-learning) applications and educational technologies should be easily within reach of different kind of people. (Debevc et al.2007) Meaning that, we have many different kinds od application, website, software or tools that allow us to access to the web for obtaining information, news, self learning purpose which helps us to improve our education institution or to accomplish our task. According to Debevc all of this application or software should be set easily to obtain and use by all the people and with no psychographic (age, gender and etc) discrimination, but there are still some country practicing gender inequality in empowerment belief and because of this cultural belief or influence, it will limit the women to uses or learn the ICT.

Based on Abbasi (2009), he says that gender inequality is a common accusation made against Islam and a disparity in educational opportunities between men and women, so it is often that many Islamic countries is cited as a primary example of gender inequality. Based on his research, he is saying that Islamic and Muslim country is more towards gender empowerment and gender inequality, so the Islamic female will always have a much lower education level and due to they are restricted from learning a higher level education, so they do not operate most of the ICT tools and software application. This factor causes the Islamic female not able to enjoy the benefit of the ICT and involve themselves in the modern technology world like we do, but I may do not agree with his statement. The reason I do not agree with his statement is because I am living in a multi-religious country which is Malaysia. We can see that the practice of Muslim in Malaysia is quite different with the statement above cited by Abbasi because in Malaysia we can see many of the higher position in company or employee is female. This shows that, the Muslim belief in Malaysia may be different with other Muslim countries or their mindset have already change to a more modern thinking and they also know the important and benefit of usage in ICT for future. Example, in my current university, a lot of my university lectures are Malays and most of them are female, this shows that Malaysia Muslim is not so gender inequality. (Utar.edu.my, n.d.)

Besides that, ICT not only gives us the functionality to access the web to get information and self learning, but with the knowledge of ICT it also gives us the opportunities to get a job or have a better life. According to UNESCO, women are still the poorest of the world’s poor, representing 70 percent of the 1.3 billion people who live in absolute poverty (Data and statistic,2001). In the previous blog post, we mentioned, in India, women are aspect to not suppose to be study beyond 12^th grade and that women’s role was as a wife and raising children at home (Roli Varmaand and Deeoak Kapur, 2015), maybe because of this cultural effect, women are less educated and so they will think that they are born to serve their husband and to take care of their family which is their child, and their duty is just to be a good household, but if their what if accident happen to their husband, they lost income and they could not go to work because they are lack of this ICT skills. Next, during the past, women think that they are born to be household, so they wont have any income and every month their husband will give them a certain amount of money to pay bills and buy grocery so after paying those bill and expenses they wont have any extra money for saving so this could also be one of the reason that made woman the poorest in the world, because many of them don’t have any income.

Furthermore, United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan admits with regret that, “When parents consider their daughter’s future, they often see education as a hindrance, not a help, to successful marriage and motherhood” (An- nan, 2000). Based on this statement, even the western country have the gender inequality belief.Parent always have the mindset that all their daughter need to do is learn how to be a good wife and married a wealthy husband and it is just a waste of time and resources for sending their daughter to go for a higher education, especially toward the ICT program. The ICT program to their parent first thought will be like this kind of job usually is for male, nerd to study and their job is to stay up late and face the computer for their life working with it, so for sure parent will deny sending their daughter to school to study or taking this courses program related to ICT although their daughter is interested. But in my my point of view, I have seen some female student taking higher education of ICT courses such as coding and etc in my school, so it shows that some parent may started to change their old mindset and leave freedom of choice for their daughter to choose what the like to study, so it is a good sign showing our modern generation, parent is more towards will of freedom.

Last but not least, education factor, Information and communication technology (ICT) have its beneficial and advantage but due to some factor and reason it stops woman from improving and learn this advance technology so it will affect a country from improving and slow economy rise. Based on World Bank President James D. Wolfensohn, in his speech to the World Education Forum in Dakar Senegal, April 27, 2000, said, “No country has succeeded without educating its people; education is key to sustaining growth and reducing poverty”. For some reason, if some of the cultural beliefs are afraid of women over past male ability, then it is time for everyone and all the countries to put aside their doubts and fears about educating women, and give it the highest priority because those countries that have higher education women shows that although is have a slower population of growth but it has a faster economy growth and a higher level of social cohesion result. As conclusion, Culture that denies choices to women and girls must be changed (Wolfensohn, 2000), meaning that it is time to throw away those gender inequality belief and girl themselves must not have the mindset of born to be household and start to learn and get educated to help themselves and improve the society. In my own point of view, if a country wanted to improve and making a better economic, the country and the society must be fair and equal to each other. Why? This is because nowadays most of the job we need ICT tools to help us operate our work, example accountant needed Microsoft Excel and programs to process their work, so if some people cant learn this skill and knowledge then it will cause unemployment and poverty will happens. Everyone is born with equal level, so change now to make a better future.

Reference:

Kimberly, B.L. & Ira, Y.,2003. Information and Communication Technology: Gender Issues in Developing Nations.Vol.6

Hadi, S., Shojaee, M.& Susan, S, 2015. Using E-Learning and ICT Courses in Educational Environment: A Review. Vol. 8, No. 1.

Raheeq, A.A., 2009. Women and education in Islam

Universiti Tunku Abdul Rahman. (2016). Utar.edu.my. Retrieved 8 March 2016

Roli, V. & Deepak, K., 2015. Communication of the ACM. Decoding Femininity in Computer Science in India. Vol. 58, No. 5. DOI:10.1145/2663339

Digital Divide : Cultural Factors

Information and communications technology/ technologies (ICT) is basically a big term that includes any communication device or application such as radio, television, cellular phones, computer and network hardware and software, satellite systems and so on, and also as well as the applications and various services, such as videoconferencing or instant messaging apps like “Skype” or “WeChat” or even to E-banking service. All in all, ICTs can be apply in many particular field such as in education, health care or in libraries and much more.

 Information and communications technology has brought about revolutionary changes in the way people work, communicate, learn, spend time and also interact. As the emergence of the internet and mobile technology in the 1990s, together with the accelerated pace of globalization, has fueled the dramatic spread of applications of ICT across sectors and nations (Jorgenson & Vu, 2016). It has cause the ICT to grow extreme fast over the year 1990 to 2014.

                         

Fig 1:World internet users and mobile phone subscribers, 1990–2014. Data source: World Bank Development Indicators; see: http://wdi.worldbank.org/tables

But however the increasing technology advances will only make worse the already-existing economic gap between technological “have” and “have not” areas and especially in gender sector. According to Hashim (2008), despite significant growth in ICT professionals during the last two decades, there still remains a gender imbalance in the society.

Gender inequality refers to unequal treatment or perceptions of individuals based on their gender and it has always being a huge problem. It can occur in any form for example like in workplace, at home or even in media, and which this has cause an direct impact toward using ICT. Historically, men are advantaged over women in terms of accessing information and communication technologies in the male-dominated society (Shirazi, 2012 and Venkatesh, 2000). This gap between men and women with regards to accessing ICTs is known as the gender digital divide.

There are many factor which can cause this gender digital divide problem to happen and one of the main factor is because of the culture of the society. One example of the male-dominated country is India, according to George (2016), despite that now is 21st century, India rejoice in celebrations when a boy is born, and if it is a girl, a muted or no celebrations is the norm and according to the article the root cause of gender inequality in Indian society lies in its patriarchy system. patriarchy is a system of social structure and practices in which men dominate, oppress and exploit women (Walby,1990). Women’s exploitation is an age old cultural phenomenon of Indian society.

According to Potnis (2015), in his study of “Culture’s consequences: Economic barriers to owning mobile phones experienced by women in India”, he listed that one of the culture factor is “long power distance” that cause female to being restrict to get contact with any ICT resource. A “long power distance” is basically talking about when people is in high/long power distance culture the are unwilling to participate in decisions and prefer their superiors making decisions for them and giving them instructions which they could follow passively (Khatri, 2009). And this is one of the barrier that prevent women to being empower in ICT field. In a male-dominated country like India, women are tightly linked to their in groups such as families that continue to protect them which make them feel secure no matter how bad the family is. Eventually this barrier has created a tough in women mind to follow their superiors for example like husband, without the permission or instruction of their superior they will just ignore any thing that involve ICT for example like mobile phone or computer.

The second culture factor is because of “The gender role define by Indian society for women” (Potnis, 2015). In India, women are aspect to not suppose to be study beyond 12^th grade and that women’s role was as a wife and raising children at home (Roli Varmaand & Deeoak Kapur, 2015). With this culture, it has created an gap between the women and the ICT, many of women in India drop out of school in a very early stage of school which eventually it cause women to become less educate in any ICT field end up creating a gender digital divide. Even though, a women had finish their study and went for a work, female professionals are generally challenged to cope with multi-role expectation and with a little support from family members and even lesser consideration from superiors at the workplaces (Shah, 2015).

The following cultural factor is cause by the “woman’s attitude”, because of the culture itself they feel like they are mend to be housewife, it has shape the mind of women causing them to feel like they rather should not own any ICT equipment because they feel like it is an unnecessarily stuff to own and maybe even if they own those ICT equipment they might not even know how to use it too. Studies have also often hypothesized that computers appeal more to men and boys than to women and girls and therefore males are more likely to have had more computer-related experience (Hashim, 2008) compare with women, they will just feel like use it when necessary only and will not further learn it. It might be economic that cause them to having this attitude too, ICT is very common to own and it seem cheap for normal people but for an low or unstable income family ICT is and unreachable item.

Culture factor is a huge deal which can cause big hinder for a women to take advantage in the ICT revolution era. there are any women empower program that try to empower women to get contact with ICT, but it might just fail because of all of these culture factor that impose to women just like the village phone program (VPP) in Bangladesh study by Hossain & Beresford (2012). But however this VP Program in Bangladesh seem to be not very effective according to the research. Technology alone, even when deployed in women-targeted programmes, cannot alter the fundamental social relations into which it is introduced (Hossain & Beresford, 2012).

As a conclusion in this blog, technology (ICT) has grow so fast and have provide many convenience to people but however Inequality in gender relations can weaken any effect of ICT. To overcome this problem, first and foremost is that more research is needed to be done in this gender empowered in ICT field to understand more about what is causing this gender inequality in ICT and also to assists women to take greater control at house hold level and promotes their empowerment in society. Failing to tackle the problem will just make the gap of ICT and women to be even further apart.

Reference:

Dale, W.J. & Khuong, M.V., 2016. Telecommunications Policy. The ICT revolution, world economic growth, and policy issues.   doi:10.1016/j.telpol.2016.01.002

Devendra, P., 2015. Telematics amd Informatics 33 (2016) 356–369. Culture’s consequences: Economic barriers to owning mobile phones experienced by women in India.

Naresh, K., 2009. Consequences of Power Distance Orientation in Organisations. The Journal of Business Perspective. Vol. 13, No 1. DOI: 10.1177/097226290901300101

Reena, A.S., 2015. Review of Management. Work-life Balance and Gender: A Study of Professionals in India. Vol. 5, No. 1/2.

Roli, V. & Deepak, K., 2015. Communication of the ACM. Decoding Femininity in Computer Science in India. Vol. 58, No. 5. DOI:10.1145/2663339

Sarah, H. & Melanie, B., 2012. Paving the pathway for women's empowerment? A review of information and communication technology development in Bangladesh, Contemporary South Asia, 20:4, 455-469, DOI: 10.1080/09584935.2012.737309

Shirazi, F., 2012. Information and communication technology and women empowerment in Iran. Telematics Inf. 29, 45–55.

Sylvia, W., 1990. Theorizing Patriarchy. 89-18057.

Venkatesh, A., 2000. Computers and new media technologies in Indian households: based on a study of eight major cities in India.