In the modern world, digital revolt has changed our way of life. Information and communication technology (ICT) is a diverse set of technological tools and resources for creating, disseminating, storing, adding value, and managing information. ICT can be a powerful catalyst for expanding women's political and social rights. Through technological capacity building, the women shall prove to be a great asset for the economic engine of the country as well. The role of women is emerging in the socio-economic, political, and physical space; therefore, their empowerment will contribute to sustainability and capacity building, which will contribute to sustainability and catastrophe risk reduction in the long run. In developing countries, especially in rural areas, women with information and communication technologies can improve their ability to cope with different situations. This study investigates the role of ICT in women empowerment, challenges of ICT use for women empowerment, the impact of women on society after ICT, and issues of ICT for women.
Top1. Introduction
In the modern world, the digital revolt has changed our way of life. ICT has the variety of technological tools that can create, distribute, store and manage information. Internet is recognized as one the most valuable tool of ICT but there are many other tools that can be used individually or can be used by merging one tool with another to catalyze the change in the process of knowledge distribution. This distribution can be done in such a way that knowledge can equally be distributed among all categories of people either they are men or women, rich or poor, rural or urban, educated or uneducated. The convergence technologies include radios, local area networks, WAP application, telecenters, mobile phones and information kiosks etc. They can easily increase the spread and dissemination of the ICT (Nath Vikas, 2001; Muzafar Saira and Jhanjhi N. Z., 2020).
ICTs have transformed societies from conventional societies to information societies. Due to ICT, we can easily access the flow of information and knowledge that lowered social, economic and practical obstacles for people to obtain information about their rights. They are now becoming a vital part of social environments and have significant empowerment potential (Ali, S. Z., 2011). They are useful in the wide range of sectors and activities. With the gradual adoption of ICT in society, they are disrupting the current social system and rebuilding new system in its place. Due to their malleable nature and linkage effect, they are able to cater all phases of social life. But this technology is enjoyed by the existing power relations in society; therefore, these technologies are gender biased. One of the rising issue in the society is a problem of gender and equal rights of women to access ICT (O'Donnell Amy and Sweetman Caroline, 2018). Although ICT has a great potential to empower women socially and politically as shown in Figure 1. But gender inequality became a dilemma for developing countries; Pakistan is also one of the country in which there is high gender inequality and discrimination (Sajid saima, 2014). It is ranked as 135th out of 136 countries for overall gender inequality ranked by Global Gender Gap Index (The global gender gap report, 2013). Therefore according to this ranking it is second worst country facing this dilemma. Gender inequality can be seen in almost all domains of life including ICT.
Figure 1. Women empowerment using ICT 1
ICT provides the development opportunities because that are the source of information distribution, providing a lot of communication capabilities, increasing access to technology and knowledge (Jorge, S. N., 2002). However these technologies are not gender neutral. ICT technologies are unevenly distributed within societies and also as across the world. This unjustified distribution has been termed as “the digital divide.” Women share poverty of men but they are still far behind than men in this information age and they are the deepest part of the divide especially in developing countries. Main concern in digital divide is the gender gap. It is very essential to ensure that women realize the importance of ICT and can easily us them in order to socially and economically develop the countries especially developing countries (Ahmed, A et al., 2006). As women face enormous challenges in several areas of development like agriculture, health, and education, they also face many hurdles to economically empower themselves by using ICT (Jorge, S N., 2002; Mustafa Maryam et al., 2017; Somolu Oreoluwa, 2007). A UNESCO report on “Gender Issues in the Information Society” stated that many social factors contributes to the women capacity of using information through ICT which includes education, social class and geographic location (Thenmozhi, G., and Arul, K, 2018).
Women’s empowerment can be increased by improving their decision power. Among many other potentials of ICT, poverty reduction is the major contribution of ICT for women. Women feel that ICT is the core element that can help them in their grooming, stay them informed and help them in their earnings (Thenmozhi, G., and Arul, K., 2018). Hence, social and economic development is totally dependent upon access and use of ICT especially in developing countries (Ahmed, A et al., 2006).