Introduction: Gender, development and ICTs

The digital revolution is transforming how humanity lives, works and relates with one another. The growth and uptake of information and communications technologies (ICTs) have the potential to improve access to information and services or enable collective action for social justice. But there is also the risk this revolution will carve stark inequalities in terms of who benefits and whose voice is heard. In this issue, Gender & Development focuses on ICTs from the perspective of women’s rights and gender justice.

Technology mirrors the societies that create it, and access to (and effective use of) technologies is affected by intersecting spectrums of exclusion including gender, ethnicity, age, social class, geography, and disability. ‘Existing power relations in society determine the enjoyment of benefits from ICTs; hence these technologies are not gender neutral’ (Gurumurthy 2004, 1). Digital tools and methodologies need to be fit for the purpose of challenging and ending the inequalities and injustices that shape poverty.

The most critical message from the articles in this issue is that if ICTs are to reach their full potential as a force for change, a feminist and social justice approach is needed. At the very start of the field of ‘international development’, technologies designed by men in the global North were assumed to be equally useful to all humanity¹. Now, we know better.

Technology can only ever be an enabler for human activities, and hence the analysis in this issue draws on a wide variety of topics across different sectors. Gender-based violence (GBV) and its links to digital is a key concern for many contributors. Online spaces offer the potential to develop new forms of violence, curbing freedom of expression in a very gendered way. They can lead to physical violence too. Eighty-two per cent of the female parliamentarians in a 2016 study by the Inter-Parliamentary Union reported having experienced some kind of psychological violence, mainly through social media, while in office (Inter-Parliamentary Union 2016, 3). At the time of writing, the ‘incel’ movement (misogynist men forming a collective online to discuss, incite and commit violence against women) is in the news media, after a murderous attack in Toronto, Canada (Hern 2018).

Yet while digital offers potential for the angry and the alienated to meet, connect, convert and recruit into violent and reactionary movements, it also offers spaces to fight such violence. Feminists are using it to organise against misogyny, abuse and violence. Online enables activists to take action which creates real change in the courts and boardrooms of the world. We are living through what is known as the #MeToo moment, where the impact of a viral conversation about gender-based violence is currently being felt in many places worldwide, at local, national, and global levels.

A theme running through many of the articles here is how digital spaces are enabling new debates both on and offline which bring spotlight and attention to sexual harassment and toxic masculinities. Online campaigns use social media to change laws and challenge harmful gendered social norms underlying GBV. In addition to collective action and mobilisation through #MeToo, local online campaigns like #mydressmychoice and #iwillgoout, have led to concrete actions and outcomes that benefit women. An example is the Flone Initiative in Kenya, which works to ensure public transport is safe for women via a range of initiatives including training transport workers. It has successfully secured legal change and disciplinary action against bus companies².

Another major point that resonates for us from this collection of articles is the need to focus on issues beyond access to ICTs, to focus on questions of knowledge and creation, agency, and empowerment. The notion of feminist principles of the Internet is a powerful framing championed by the Association for Progressive Communications. It asserts women (and queer) rights to equal access to digital, and their rights to use it for resistance, consent, discourse and decision making (see https://www.apc.org/en/pubs/feminist-principles-internet-version-20, last checked 4 June 2018). The issue offers up a strong message not to consider digital in a vacuum without feminist – and intersectional - power analysis of the political, social and economic systems within which these technologies sit.

A gender gap exists in access to ICTs, but far greater divides exist in relation to the design of hardware and software through to the very power to contribute, create and control content. A clear message of the articles in this issue concern the pressing need for international development policymakers and practitioners to focus beyond the statistics about women’s ownership of mobiles, and even beyond the statistics on women going online. Most technologies have been designed by the few for the many, with visible and invisible power dynamics that offer context and knowledge created by elites, and as such there is a risk they will be used to consolidate existing power relations.

In the sections that follow, we consider the relationship between gender issues and digital in more detail, and introduce the articles that you can read in this issue.

Complex inequalities: nuancing digital divides

The statistics for ICT roll-out across the world are staggering. By the end of 2016, two thirds of the world’s population had a mobile phone subscription – a total of 4.8 billion unique subscribers (meaning individual users, as opposed to counting sim cards). These figures do not reflect an even greater number of individuals who share access to devices. Asia Pacific will account for two-thirds of the 860 million new subscribers expected globally by 2020. At that point, almost three quarters of the world’s population – or 5.7 billion people – will subscribe to mobile services (GSMA Intelligence 2017, 2). The proportion of humanity which now accesses the Internet is also rising exponentially. The number of individuals accessing the Internet over mobile devices has doubled over the past five years to 3.6 billion, and will rise to 4.7 billion, equivalent to 60 per cent of the global population, by 2020 (ibid., 4).

Yet while such figures are frequently referenced to evidence the sheer scale of change, critically we need to look beyond who has a phone in their pocket. Regional rates for subscribers to mobile services vary widely. In 2020, they are forecast to range from 50 per cent in sub-Saharan Africa, to 87 per cent in Europe (GSMA 2017, 2). Context is as important as personal characteristics in analysing who is offline and out of contact. Infrastructural issues, affordability, issues of freedom of information, agency, ability and others, are all critical in understanding the challenges different people face when attempting to communicate, to inform, and gain information, online.

Multiple identities – including gender, race, and class - are all critical factors responsible for limiting who has access to digital in a given context. We need to ask questions about policy, culture, power and capabilities, with a gender and intersectionality lens. Recent data estimates women are 10 per cent less likely than men to own a mobile phone (GSMA 2018, 3)³. In some regions the gender gap is higher: the same information source suggests women in South Asia are 26 per cent less likely to own a mobile than men, and 70 per cent less likely to go on the Internet (ibid.).

Yet the digital divide is much more complicated than any neat binary comparison between male and female ownership and online access. Gender intersects with many other aspects of difference and disadvantage. As in other development debates, questions of complex inequalities arise here: a middle-class woman living in a big city is very much more likely to have a mobile phone than a man who lives in a rural isolated location, below the poverty line. Here, the notion that underpins the SDG agenda to ‘Leave No-One Behind’ (Stuart and Woodroffe 2016) is relevant. It will be the poorest and most marginalised who will be last to access and benefit from ICTs. These realities are brought to life in articles in this issue focusing on experiences from India, Afghanistan, the Philippines, South Africa, Kenya, Jamaica, and Bolivia.

Development policymakers and practitioners are currently focusing on the potential for ICTs to help deliver economic and social development in a variety of ways and realising the full potential of ICTs to drive development in line with the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The sector has huge and growing economic power: in 2016, mobile technologies and services generated 4.4 per cent of GDP globally, equivalent to around USD$3.3 trillion of economic value. This is forecast to increase to more than USD$4.2 trillion (4.9 per cent of GDP) by 2020 (GSMA 2017, 2). Digital offers scope to deliver huge wealth to some, and/or to enable humanity to realise the SDGs, as well as to monitor progress towards them. Data and technology are being used by activists informed by different aims and aspirations for a range of purposes, broadly in line with visions of human development. The insights offered by writers in this article show that approaches to ICTs in development need to be widened and deepened. If development is seen as a process designed to enable people to free themselves from structural disadvantage, ICTs for development need to be seen in terms of their scope to help do this⁴.

A focus that goes beyond issues of access to ICTs, and a recognition of their potential for harm as well as good, is needed for ICTs to realise their full potential for social justice, including gender equality. The current ‘ICT4D’ approach is a relatively new label for thinking, research and policymaking concerned with the use of ICTs for international development (Walsham 2017). Feminist critiques of ICT4D emphasise the need to move beyond the notion of the 4As it uses – access, affordability, availability and awareness – to address questions of power and inequality (Tongia et al. 2005). Agency and ability are two more ‘A’s that could be added to the list to help achieve this.

In their article in this issue, Faheed Hussain and Sara Amin consider these issues in the context of their recent research into women’s use of ICTs in urban Afghanistan. In Afghanistan, ICT4D strategies involving international development donors and government are encouraging a focus on the access of women to digital devices and online, and on the link between education and ICTs. These are important questions, but this article provides evidence of the pressing need to recognise there can be no such easy solutions to empowerment of women, and the need to think more ambitiously and creatively about how digital empowers women living challenging lives in difficult contexts.

From access to empowerment: the potential of digital to change gender relations

To fully understand both the current impact of ICTs on gender relations and women’s rights – and their potential to advance gender equality – it is important to look at what having a phone or going online can actually do for the user. How empowering are these experiences?

Faheed Hussain and Sara N. Amin’s article, first mentioned above, shows ICTs’ role in supporting urban Afghan women’s ‘effective’ agency (Kabeer 2005, 15) – helping them to cope in daily life, fulfilling their roles in family and society. Yet – while appreciating the importance of recognising effective agency as a worthwhile goal in its own right – their study shows how essential it is to aim beyond supporting women to be effective in their everyday lives. To play a part in empowering women, ICTs need to enable them to exercise ‘transformative’ agency and to challenge gender inequality. This Afghan case-study case highlights a need for much more focus on how women use ICTs, and how men prevent them exercising transformative agency at household level, controlling and policing women’s use of ICTs. Faheed Hussain and Sara N. Amin argue that a focus on access, not feminist empowerment, means international development policymakers and practitioners will ignore this critical distinction.

In her article in this issue, Ronda Zelezny-Green discusses related concerns about current aims and understandings of the scope of ICTs for women’s empowerment and gender equality. In previous work, Ronda Zelezny-Green focused on the use of online as a substitute source of education and information for young women who cannot regularly attend school in earlier work (2014). In her article in this current issue, however, she turns to look at how young women school students use ICTs after school hours. To focus only on formal education is to miss the enormous and positive role ICTs can play in increasing the agency and power of young women, in a range of ways. Through introducing two new apps – biNu and Worldreader – she shows the importance of taking a holistic view of the potential of ICTs to empower young women. This article is doing something important: it is highlighting the limitations of conventional narrow ideas about development that focus on production and economic development, seeing it as ‘legitimate’ for development actors to focus on formal education and ICTs as a means to this - rather than taking a wider view of both development and human life.

Ronda Zelezny-Green’s study, like Faheem Hussain and Sara N. Amin’s Afghan study, recognises the worth of entertainment and leisure – not traditionally considered as worthwhile or important by international development actors – in women’s lives. They offer women respite from onerous work, in contexts where movement, choices and opportunities are constrained. Information, informal education, skills, and confidence, can all be delivered through entertainment and relaxation gained via social media engagement, apps and podcasts. And of course, this analysis of the use of ICTs in building young women’s power and agency applies to all contexts – not only the low-income countries that are the focus of ‘international development’.

The proliferation of blogs and websites offering routes to self-expression and self-publication is an opportunity for those who would not normally have found a means to publish their experiences, writing, or photography to do so and find an audience. As Ronda Zelezny-Green concludes,

girls’ rights in the digital age can be eroded by the friction that arises as their mobile use is confronted by government policies which can limit the choices girls have to use mobile in ways they value

(this issue, 303).

This insight opens up bigger questions about how policymakers are responding to fast-paced change and understanding both the downsides and the possibilities of digital⁵.

Beyond access to power analysis: whose tools and whose knowledge?

Assessing the empowerment potential of digital also requires looking at the kinds of content and opportunities for communication it offers. For ICTs to be as empowering as they possibly can be, more online content needs to challenge gender biases and fill in the gaps in history, offering an alternative account, or ‘herstory’. Gender & Development first published an issue on Technology in 1999, a moment at which the potential of ICTs to transform the lives of women was already clear to feminists writing in the issue. So, also, was the pervasive gender bias in the sector (Gajjala and Mamidipudi 1999).

The world of digital is heavily male-dominated. Careers in tech design are dominated by men, as are roles in the new technologies , which are generally designed by professionals employed by powerful companies. These roles are disproportionately filled by men rather than women. 2012 figures from the UK, showed women holding 17 per cent of jobs in tech (Kiss 2012, no page number), and 25 per cent in the US (Ashcraft et al. 2016, 2). The result is that content, applications and tools are developed in the main by men. Technologies that could potentially benefit everyone regardless of gender roles and relations are often more likely to be tailored to men’s interests and needs, and accessed by male users. And technologies that might potentially play a significant role in improving the lives of women and girls specifically, enabling them to perform activities seen as ‘women’s work’ more efficiently, for example low-cost domestic labour-saving technologies, are often slower to be developed than those associated with men’s roles.

Why the low numbers of women in tech? First, science and technology is still seen by many as a male field. The masculinised working culture in these sectors makes them challenging environments for workers who do not ‘fit in’. Beyond gender bias, tech industries began in the global North and they employ highly educated workforces for the creative roles.

We also need to look beyond design to content creation. The activist campaign Whose Knowledge? is among voices analysing the power dynamics at play in the digital revolution. It argues for a focus beyond the digital divide and access, to a focus on the biases favouring elites that characterise and moderate online content – and the ‘knowledge’ available on the web. It seeks to promote and support opportunities for marginalised individuals and groups to create content – spreading their own knowledge which may challenge conventional wisdom created by power-holders – and challenge the racism, sexism, and post-colonial power inequalities that form part of the landscape of the online environment and the resources or content available.

Just as education specialists see a need to reform curricula to challenge prejudice and unconscious bias, feminists in ICTs are challenging apparently neutral online spaces including Wikipedia⁶, and pursuing activism online in a multitude of ways, including occupying, redesigning and adapting online spaces. Questions of who designs ICTs, to what end, and for whom, are central to discussions of their impact on women and girls, men and boys, and gender roles and relations. Focusing in this way enables us to see the transformative potential of ICTs.

Crucially, we need to recognise how digital content affects our attitudes, beliefs, and ideas. Some digital tools offer potential to network and organise, to challenge the structural inequalities that constrain human beings, perpetuate inequalities, and prevent just and sustainable human development. Whose Knowledge? is a global, multilingual campaign that aims to ‘center the knowledge of marginalised communities (the majority of the world) on the internet’ (homepage, https://whoseknowledge.org/, last checked 23 May 2018). The extent of the challenge can be seen in the fact that only 0.7 per cent of the world’s domain names are registered in sub-Saharan Africa (Ojanperä et al. 2017, 40), while the continent has only 10 per cent of the world’s internet users (ibid.). Whose Knowledge? estimates that only about seven per cent of the world’s 7,000 languages are captured in published material (Graham and Sengupta 2017, no page number). The Whose Knowledge? campaign aspires to decolonise the internet and make public knowledge and the online experience less white, male, straight, and global North in origin (personal communication, 2018). We encourage readers to visit their website to find out more.

ICTs and their impact on gender relations

As stated at the start of this Introduction, a focus for many articles in this issue is gender-based violence (GBV) and abuse. And as also noted above, a nuanced analysis is needed which moves beyond a ‘good or bad?’ debate to focus on detailed case studies of the different experiences of particular groups in specific contexts, including their strategies to counter GBV.

In his article in this issue, Dhanaraj Thakur offers findings from a study into ICTs and GBV in Jamaica identifying that previously there has been ‘no empirical research that explores the relationship between VAW and ICTs in the Caribbean (this issue, 277)'. He observes that Jamaica is a patriarchal society ‘where relationships and social structures are designed to maintain male power (ibid., 277)', with some of the highest murder rates in the region and the world. The research discussed in his article reveals the proliferation of new forms of online violence, and the ways in which online can be used to increase control and surveillance of women by abusers, and incite violence offline.

Dhanaraj Thakur sees the low level of awareness and acknowledgement of GBV as a problem online – even among women’s activist groups and feminist scholars and community groups - as a pressing issue. Such violence is widespread: two-thirds (65 per cent) of a sample of 909 women and men said they had witnessed online abuse. Online is an environment where the social norms that justify and perpetuate GBV, normalising it as an everyday aspect of gender relations, are alive and flourishing. Dhanaraj Thakur highlights some aspects of the online environment which are argued to increase the likelihood that individuals perpetrate violence and abuse: the chance of anonymity, the fact that online exchanges are electronic and occur at a distance, meaning empathy can be reduced; and the speed at which images and messages can be sent. He finds that ICTs tended to increase risks linked to VAW, and young women in particular were more likely than others to be the target of online sexual harassment. Being female increases the likelihood of experiencing violence, but decreases the likelihood of reporting, which skews statistics.

As highlighted at the start of this Introduction, online is also home to new forms of GBV, including trolling on social media when women seen as stepping out of line can be disciplined through online abuse and harassment, which often threatens women and girls offline. Also, as Dhanaraj Thakur notes in the Jamaican context, ICTs play a role in offline violence including stalking, harassment, and invasion of privacy, and ‘new forms of violence are evolving that are unique to the online environment, for example “revenge porn” (this issue, 268). Mobile phones with tracking devices, and apps sharing location, create opportunities for surveillance and greater control of women’s mobility. Of course, they can also be used to ensure safety and security, showing the potential of ICTs for both good and harm.

In another article in this issue, Shannon Philip traces the changes to social norms that are taking place as a result of social media use. In his study, Shannon Philips shows the impact ICTs are having in changing, challenging and morphing gender norms around young people and sexual/romantic relations in India. By offering women and girls, and men and boys, new ways of encountering each other, forming a connection and possibly going on to meet each other, without the involvement of mutual friends or family, ICTs offer new ways of finding sex, romance, and/or marriage partners. This presents an opportunity to users to evolve a very different trajectory in terms of intimate relationships.

Shannon Philip shows how ICTs are revolutionising relations between the sexes in urban India among relatively affluent parts of the population, at least. He finds that they offer young women and men new spaces to express themselves in new ways, forming relationships that start beyond the traditional social networks where families and mutual friends have often played a powerful part. Restrictions that surrounded traditional meetings between single young men and women are circumvented. Shannon Philips argues that because of this, ICTs offer emancipation from ‘the conventional policing of their families and broader society (this issue, 323)’.

However, since ICTs and social are imbued with the norms, prejudices and power relations of the surrounding culture, interactions reproduce ‘some of the paradoxes and biases of patriarchal Indian society online, which are particularly misogynistic (this issue, 323)’. This and other articles in this issue remind us once more of the need to see communications technologies as neither intrinsically good or bad – rather, their impact for good or bad depends on the intent and perceptions of the user.

ICTs and feminist activism

From discussing evidence of on- and offline violence, and the role of technology-enabled conversations in changes to norms, the articles in this issue move on to unravel how technology itself can be part of tactics to challenge GBV. Articles in this issue from feminist activists using social media show how this newly-possible activism is currently reshaping the public sphere to make cities, offices, recruitment processes and production lines places where women are more likely to participate without abuse from men who either feel entitlement to use women’s bodies, or anger at their temerity in entering what were once exclusively male spaces. Online activism is challenging the daily, demoralising violence that women have endured until now. It does this by naming, outing and combating violence and the harmful social norms and attitudes that drive it, and enabling women and girls who have survived it to call it out and challenge the perpetrators.

Writers on this theme provide powerful examples of using tech to mobilise public support, to lobby and advocate for legal changes, and for policies that will end violence and promote equality. Online communications can post breaking news and almost instantaneously create movements to challenge injustices and change the world, using pre-existing networks of friends and contacts, and creating new networks and coalitions to push forward on shared priorities. This can happen both on- and off-line, in cyberspaces and city squares. Authors share their personal experiences of these actions, in a range of locations.

For social justice activists, online offers infinite opportunities for collective action - via apps and social media sites, we can all extend our social networks far beyond our offline contacts, opening possibilities for collective action and coalition-building. Campaigning via petitions and crowd-funding initiatives are just two of the many possibilities that ICTs have created in the current era of complex inequalities and a growing gap between the rich and the poor. Campaigns including #Metoo have challenged sexual harassment, enabling women and girls to identify and call out abuse, seeking strength from the ‘power with’ generated through online communities. These campaigns have spread offline and many of them have used ‘traditional’ modes of activism in addition to online – for example, marches and press strategies to get media engagement. While #MeToo is largely a global North led campaign, popularised in Hollywood, social media campaigns can be owned locally and be keen to stay that way!

The #IWillGoOut is an example of such a locally-rooted campaign. Divya Titus’s article provides a fascinating and invaluable account of the detailed development of the campaign, which began on Facebook and spread offline. Divya Titus tells the story of how social media became a gateway for activism by young feminists in the India tech hub of Bengalaru, in response to mass sexual assaults on New Year’s Eve in the city. In the #IWillGoOut campaign, social media played a central role in the organising strategies of young feminists who encountered each other on social media, and built an online and offline campaign calling for the safety of women and sexual and gender minorities in public spaces in India. While this activism ran in the same time-period as international activism around the election of Donald Trump as US President, the #IWillGoOut campaign was running parallel yet distinct, drawing its inspiration, energy and identity from a history of Indian feminist movement-building around both political and economic rights. Divya Titus states:

Today, almost three decades after the liberalisation of the Indian economy, the development of ICTs, a rapid rise in access to mobile phones, and the increasing reach of social media have provided new tools for women’s rights activism with the potential to shift the nature of activism … . Within this increasingly complex environment, new generations of feminists and activists have begun to question the role and nature of both gender and sexuality …

(this issue, 236)

The speed of use of social media that can facilitate abuse is remarked on in this case-study as a positive, facilitating activism. Rapid interest on the part of a mass of social media users was welcome but plans for offline activity around marches and events were seen as important in order to maximise the chances of achieving what she calls ‘real change’ – that is, legislative change to ensure women’s safety in public spaces. The #IWillGoOut campaign has inspired similar activism internationally, and continues to provide a feminist space for dialogue, attracting young activists. A key aspect of the experience for Divya Titus is the flat, democratic, collective ethos that is possible using online methods in activism.

Turning from a locally-rooted experience of activism using ICTs, we move to consider how international development organisations can use them in partnership with local organisations on shared goals. In her article here on Oxfam’s Enough! Campaign in Bolivia, Sandrine Muir-Bouchard bridges the gap between political activism and international development. In Bolivia, campaigners have used social media to raise awareness of unequal gender power relations in intimate relationships. Getting youth involved in the campaign to challenge and change social norms has led naturally to using strategies for change that use social media, including Facebook, memes, and the technique of ‘social experiments’. The power of collective action to create a critical mass of individuals networking to form a movement for change is felt powerfully in these online activities. The Enough! Campaign in Bolivia has aimed to create public conversations around the social norms of machismo and its complementary female stereotype, marianismo.

This is a long distance away from seeing ICTs for development as a question of enabling access to devices. Currently the jury is out about the extent to which intense, concentrated and time-bound initiatives using these new methods creates lasting change – it is simply too soon to tell. However, such case studies show vividly the power of using social media in campaigning to change social norms.

In turn, in their article, Tilly Gurman, Catherine Nichols and Elyssa S. Greenberg also focus on the potential of social media to challenge GBV. They draw on a content analysis in India of Twitter and its potential to counter GBV, emphasising the importance of social media to activists. The research they discuss analysed GBV-related tweets posted by individuals located in India during one month, September to October 2013, around the time of the high-profile trial of the Delhi rape case defendants⁷. While social norms were not frequently the focus of tweets, more women than men raised and challenged the norm of blaming women for GBV.

As we look deeper into the power of going digital, one of the by-products of people’s use of technological devices and services is the huge amount of data generated about user behaviours and preferences. This holds great power and has implications for how people are treated where few agencies and authorities are making the connection between the ‘power of data to sort, categorise and intervene’ (Taylor 2017, 1) and social justice which has practical and political implications (ibid.).

These and other experiences of how digital has been used by activists offer a stark reminder not to reduce evidence on change to quantitative data, neglecting nuanced, qualitative information offered by other means. We need both, to enable a full consideration of the whole complex picture of the impact of human activities. This might be how we measure success – for example in online campaigns, being cautious of the ‘clicktivism’ phenomena where people show their support with a Facebook Like or a re-tweet where we need to qualify this with the change that resulted. But moreover – the concept of ‘data justice’ coined by Linnet Taylor (2017) speaks to bigger questions about how decisions are made, who is represented and whose voices are heard.

Conclusion

The articles in this issue show that to gain a clear idea of the effects of ICTs on gender relations in society, and the opportunities and threats they present to women’s rights and gender equality, we need to think about both elements in the acronym ‘ICT’ – information technologies and communications technologies. Communications technologies enable us to contact others, conveying information over distances and bridging gaps between people and messages (both literally and figuratively), enabling individuals to join together in groups and creating new opportunities for organisation. They offer unprecedented opportunities to groups to advance their interests and priorities. The recent Cambridge Analytica scandal⁸ revealed insights into the extent to which the power of data can even be used to influence the results of elections. Given these technologies and communications are shaped by gender norms and power relations, their impact on politics and society needs to be analysed through a gender lens.

The second element is the information - ‘content’ – that is created and spread using communications technologies, which can be supportive of social justice and human development visions based on equalities – or it can push back against this vision of positive change. In the wake of the Fourth Industrial Revolution⁹ where we can expect even more advancements in algorithms and artificial intelligence in the face of the increasing power of tech companies, enhanced surveillance and closing civil society space: these challenges are set to become more pronounced. But the potential for human advancement and social justice have equally high potential. Given technology mirrors realities in society, with the power to exacerbate or enhance, this issue proves that more than ever, feminist analysis is needed to realise the full potential of the digital revolution for social justice, including gender equality.

Notes

1 There is still too much tendency to consider technologies as entirely and universally positive, associated with modernity, progress and development as this was first coined, seventy years ago, by the then-US President Harry Truman. In his inaugural address, he advanced the idea of ‘development’ as a technical process, that amounted to:

 … a bold new program for making the benefits of our scientific advances and industrial progress available for the improvement and growth of underdeveloped areas … Greater production is the key to prosperity and peace. And the key to greater production is a wider and more vigorous application of modern scientific and technical knowledge

(Truman 1949).

2 For more information, see the Flone Initiative, set up by Naomi Mwaura http://www.floneinitiative.org/ (last checked 11 June 2018).

3 Mobile ownership is defined in the GSMA study (2017) as a person having sole or main use of a SIM card (or a mobile phone that does not require a SIM), and using it at least once a month.

4 Examples of this thinking include Dorothea Kleine’s (2012) book, Technologies of Choice?, offers a way of thinking about the role of information and communication technologies in human development. In turn, Sammia Poveda and Tony Roberts (2017) offer an analysis of ICTs in relation to the thinking about critical consciousness of Paulo Freire, as well as the development thinking of Amartya Sen.

5 Currently, many policymakers are discussing online access in relation to young people in a more negative context of concern about over-use. All who are able to access digital are familiar with the compulsion to be online and on our mobiles, to the extent that this can be unproductive at best and at worst considered an addiction. Commercial interests can have power to manipulate users to serve their own ends.

6 For example, see https://webfoundation.org/our-work/projects/womens-rights-online/ and GSMA https://www.gsma.com/mobilefordevelopment/programmes/connected-women/) (last checked 4 June 2018).

7 For an example of the mass media coverage of the case, which continues to attract attention five years later, see Chamberlain and Bhabani (2017).

8 Cambridge Analytica was a British data analytics firm. In March 2018, multiple media outlets broke news of Cambridge Analytica's business practices where they used personal information harvested from more than 50 million Facebook profiles without permission to build a system that could target US voters with personalised political advertisements based on their psychological profiles. Read more in this overview, https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/mar/26/the-cambridge-analytica-files-the-story-so-far (last checked 11/06/18).

9 The Fourth Industrial Revolution is a concept coined by Klaus Schwab in the context of the World Economic Forum 2016. It refers to a technological revolution. Klaus Swab argues that if the third Industrial revolution is the digital revolution that has been occurring since the middle of the last century, humanity is on the brink of a fourth which is characterised by a fusion of technologies that is blurring the lines between the physical, digital, and biological spheres. It is marked by emerging technology breakthroughs in a number of fields, including robotics, artificial intelligence and blockchain. For more information see his blog, https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2016/01/the-fourth-industrial-revolution-what-it-means-and-how-to-respond/ (last checked 11 June 2018).