Information and Communication Technology and Contesting Gender Hierarchies:

Research Learnings from Africa and the Middle East

Author(s): Anne Webb
Source: Journal of Information Policy , 2016, Vol. 6 (2016), pp. 460-474
Published by: Penn State University Press

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5325/jinfopoli.6.2016.0460

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 Information and Communication
Technology and Contesting
Gender Hierarchies
Research Learnings from Africa and the Middle East

Anne Webb

Abstract
Communication policies intended to contribute to changing persistent ­inequalities
need to be informed by an in-depth understanding of systemic barriers to gen-
der equality and women’s empowerment. Not taking into account complex, his-
torically entrenched forces that perpetuate established gendered hierarchies may
result in policies effecting only superficial change. The research presented in this
article demonstrates how availability of information and communication technol-
ogy (ICT) does not ensure equitable access and gender equality. Access needs to
be imbedded in a women’s empowerment and equality agenda to contribute to
transforming gender relations. Understanding what that involves is critical to the
design of ICT policies that challenge gender inequalities.
Keywords: ICT, gender equality, ICT policy, Africa and the Middle East, gender
research into ICTs

Introduction

This article illustrates what it takes for women to benefit from integrating
information and communication technology (ICT) into their lives and to
redefine the predominant trajectory of ICT, which sustains and reinforces
inequitable social norms. The analysis is based on in-depth ICT research
conducted with “gender” and “empowerment” as the principle analytical
lenses.
ICTs are undeniably creating options and facilitating communications
in previously unheard of ways. These mediums “have grown and spread
in a way that has no precedent with other media.”1 And while “their reach

1. Jensen, 19.

Journal of Information Policy, Volume 6, 2016

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 Information and Communication Technology 461

and usefulness is still far from ubiquitous,”2 demand and access are ever
increasing, as is the spectrum of options, tools, and expectations. While
their prevalence and capabilities are shaping informational and communi-
cative norms, they are also constituting predominant social norms in new
ways. In this context it is important to recognize what interests are dom-
inating not only design, production, and availability, but also the social,
economic, and cultural hierarchies that are being maintained, facilitated,
and enhanced in multifarious ways. As Gurumurthy argues, “the systems,
structures and processes in techno-mediated environments are predicated
upon the premises and values, the world view and intent, embedded into
the technology.”3 If efforts to increase women’s presence and participation
in and shaping of ICT fields are undertaken without questioning and
challenging existing inequitable systems, structures, and processes, and are
seen as a matter of merely fitting women in, any change to these relations
and environments may be minimal and ephemeral.4
In this article I use four examples from recent research to illustrate
how availability of ICT does not ensure equitable access and foster gender
equality, although women’s use of the technologies may increase. Access
needs to be embedded in a women’s empowerment and equality agenda for
it to contribute to transforming gender relations rather than to enhancing
existing inequitable norms and social hierarchies. The objective of this arti-
cle is to demonstrate the need to recognize and understand the political,
social, cultural, and economic contexts and norms into which ICTs have
been introduced—and thus the historical continuities which they may
bolster5—in order to design change strategies and policies that challenge
existing inequalities.
The research examples demonstrate how just adding ICT “solutions”
and “benefits” to inequitable realities can leave prevailing narratives, bar-
riers, and structures intact. For communication policies to contribute to
changing persisting inequalities, they need to be informed by an in-depth
understanding of the systemic barriers to gender equality and women’s
empowerment. A failure to do so will likely result in policies only effecting
superficial change.

2. Loc. cit.
3. Gurumurthy.
4. Gillard et al., 266.
5. Jensen, 19.

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 462 JOURNAL OF INFORMATION POLICY

The approach to empowerment that informs this article draws from

Naila Kabeer’s understanding of women’s empowerment being “about the
process by which those who have been denied the ability to make strategic
life choices acquire such an ability.”6 Embedded in such an understanding
of empowerment is recognition of women’s agency as “both recognising
and challenging social injustice and unequal power relations.”7 However,
given that social, economic, cultural, and other forces “constrain w ­ omen’s
ability to make strategic life choices,” it is understood that “structural
inequalities cannot be addressed by individuals alone.”8 “For many, agency
is partial and incomplete, a process rather than a full understanding. This
agency of intention, where people seek change, but often in constrained cir-
cumstances and partial understandings, is also essential for change.”9 The
research to which I refer provides examples of women seeking change in
constrained circumstances, and utilizing and creating (to different degrees)
ICT spaces and contexts that enhance and are constitutive of their aspira-
tions and actions to achieve more gender-equitable social norms.
The research was conducted in Africa and the Middle East between 2008
and 2012 by researchers from the context in which they conducted their
research, and is published in Women and ICTs in Africa and the Middle
East: Changing Selves, Changing Societies.10 The research interventions
explored how ICT can contribute to women’s empowerment in a range
of very different ways and contexts using a variety of research approaches.
While each context is unique and culturally, socially, and politically spe-
cific, the challenges faced and lessons learned are at the same time highly
relevant and applicable to social and communication policies and practices
in diverse contexts.
As indicated by the book title, what it takes for women to benefit from
integrating ICT into their lives “is not a matter of specific products or
identifying special needs. It is more about identifying barriers, constraints
and supports within our societies, communities and ourselves, and finding
solutions that take these layers of our realities into account.”11 It is about
interrupting the perpetuation of socioeconomic relations and conditions
that are detrimental to women—the same social relations and forces that

6. Kabeer, 435.
7. Parpart, 383.
8. Kabeer, 547.
9. Parpart, 392.
10. Buskens and Webb.
11. Webb.

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 Information and Communication Technology 463

shape the access, use, design, designers, and benefits of online spaces,
tools, and knowledge—and reconstituting policies and practices in the
interests of creating gender-equitable and empowering ICT spaces and
development.
The first two examples were selected for their illustration of the con-
straints on women’s potential that persist when ICT access is achieved
while gendered hierarchies are largely unchecked. The second two exam-
ples illustrate degrees of change in gendered norms, practices, and behav-
iors when societal norms are questioned and another way of living in one’s
world is identified and acted upon.

Research Examples: Beyond Access to Actualization

of Capacities and Agency

Inequality of ICT Use, Mastery, and Benefit for Women in a Context

of Secured Legal Rights and ICT Access

The first example is located in Tunisia. The researcher, Dr. Oum Kalthoum
Ben Hassine, explored the “degree of women’s access to, use of and mastery
of ICTs, and the implications of accomplishments in ICT for ­women’s
equality.”12 This was a particularly relevant exploration in Tunisia, as “pub-
lic policy in Tunisia has both recognized the legal rights of Tunisian women
in its Personal Status Code (PSC)13 and supported the development of
ICT since the 1980s. Furthermore, particular efforts have been made to
promote the capacities of women in ICT.”14 Progressive state legislation
that dates back to the 1950s, the disregard of women’s legal rights in prac-
tice, the expansion of the ICT sector as an economic growth strategy, and
increasing Islamization are all factors that Ben Hassine takes into account
when investigating how “access to ICTs plays itself out in terms of equality

12. Ben Hassine, 81.

13. “The Personal Status Code is a series of progressive Tunisian laws promulgated on
13 August 1956 that aim at equality between men and women in a number of domains. It gives
women a unique place in Tunisian society and in the Arab world in general, abolishing in par-
ticular polygamy, creating a judicial procedure for divorce and authorizing marriage only with
mutual consent of both partners. This feminist policy unquestionably contributed to political
modernization of the country” (Ben Hassine, 92).
14. Ben Hassine, 81.

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 464 JOURNAL OF INFORMATION POLICY

and self-determination for women at the Faculty of Sciences at Tunis El

Manar University.”15
She found that equity of availability of ICT had been achieved. However,
a range of social factors and values, both internalized and imposed, inter-
fere with women’s achievement of “equality of use, mastery or benefit.”16
As Ben Hassine elaborates,

To remedy the situation of inequality, most of the women

­respondents—who believe that acquisition of advanced skills in ICT
will ensure their empowerment regarding ICTs—suggested that, “in
order to have some of our time made available some of our family
responsibilities [child care] could be alleviated by our work places
[by the creation of nurseries, kindergartens and canteens].” They
suggested also “taking on additional training to strengthen our skills
and increase our knowledge in the field of ICT.” They want to gain
the self- and professional development that they see as possible with
ICTs, but without questioning or unsettling the current gender roles
and relations.17

According to Ben Hassine, her research

shows that availability of computers and the Internet does not mean
equity of access to them or equally beneficial use thereof. It shows
that even gender-sensitive ICT policy on its own does not ensure
equally beneficial use; such policy and a legal framework for w ­ omen’s
rights are not enough. This research also shows the strength and resil-
ience of socially, culturally, historically and economically normalized,
internalized and perpetuated gender relations.18

The author recommends, given this situation, a “focus on supporting and

nurturing young women’s gender awareness since this is the first step in
an empowerment process”19 and she thus provides a number of suggested
actions that could be taken by El Manar University to act on this focus.

15. Ibid., 83.

16. Ibid., 84.
17. Ibid., 86–87.
18. Ibid., 87.
19. Ibid., 91–92.

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 Information and Communication Technology 465

Gendered Experiences of Virtual Participation

The second example, based in Senegal, “focuses on the use of information

and communication technology (ICT) by women political leaders.”20 The
intent of the research was to see if the “use of ICT enhances or hinders
political participation of women political leaders in Senegal.”21 According
to the researcher, Dr. Ibou Sané,

as in many African countries, the political space is characterized

more by the “outward show” of female political participation than
by actual integration of women as political partners on equal terms.
Politics in Senegal remains a space of male domination in the way
roles and authority are distributed and in the way the party political
hierarchy favours, to varying degrees, political participation in activ-
ities that take place within the structures of its domain . . . Women’s
demographic weight and passionate, even militant political partici-
pation stand in contrast to their political under-representation; their
great political engagement is not balanced with a commensurate rep-
resentation in political institutions.22

According to Sané, “equality in decision-making will give women the

weight that is needed to integrate a perspective of gender equality into the
political arena and the way politics is done.”23
As with the research of Ben Hassine, Sané takes into account multiple
contextual factors such as the legitimization of male domination within tra-
ditional society as “embedded in cultural customs and actualized through
the internalization of beliefs and norms,” “the critical work of women’s
organizations, particularly the feminist movement” in Senegal, the history
of women’s militancy to advance women’s involvement in decision-making
processes in political parties,24 and Senegal’s strategy since 1997 to facilitate
access to ICT. Through his interviews Sané found that “from the responses
of women with political ambitions, a picture emerged of conflict and ten-
sion in the relationships between men and women, because of the mech-
anisms developed by men to maintain their privileges and the attempts of

20. Sané, 69.

21. Loc. cit.
22. Loc. cit.
23. Loc. cit.
24. Ibid., 71–72.

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 466 JOURNAL OF INFORMATION POLICY

women to redistribute political power.”25 He found “a gender-specific use

of ICT is emerging where women feel ‘forced’ to use ICT.”26 As he stated,

As women are often not able to attend political meetings that are
held in the evenings—not only for security reasons but also because
it is not deemed proper for Senegalese women to go out at night
on their own—using (mobile) telephony and the Internet (the two
most popular forms of ICT in Senegal) enables them to participate
in political meetings while they are physically absent. In this way
they can give their opinions and defend their points of view on the
issues under discussion without having to leave their houses.27

According to Sané, of the ICT options used, women would prefer to use
SMS to convey their perspectives, as these messages were less open to inter-
pretation than “an ephemeral telephone conversation.” A woman political
leader’s SMS message could be shown by the man chairing the meeting to
the other members, so they could see the content for themselves. However,
the chair of the meeting was in a position to decide what steps to take:

he could agree to reveal the content of the messages when he deemed

the situation favourable and conceal the content when he deemed
it unfavourable. In the first case he could involve a few people in
the decision process and devote the necessary energy to convincing
his comrades to agree with him. In the second case he could exer-
cise a ‘blackout’ policy and ignore the SMS, unless another party
member who received the same message spoke about it to others. It
sometimes happened that the woman who sent the SMS would be
asked to come and physically defend her point of view. It is obvious,
however, that even though the use of SMSs gave women some form
of political agency, everything still depended on the judgement and
goodwill of the men in power.28

In addition to the potential screening of their input, virtually partici-

pating in political meetings could limit women’s active participation in

25. Ibid., 73.

26. Ibid., 76.
27. Loc. cit.
28. Ibid., 76–77.

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 Information and Communication Technology 467

and influence on discussions and debates. “While attending meetings

in ­person, women would have the opportunity to establish their point
of view, refine their arguments and convince men in the dialogue of the
moment.” According to Sané, women’s physical absence during discus-
sions and voting could be to their disadvantage as men could take their
views less seriously.29
It seems that women political leaders’ access to and integration of ICT
provides them with avenues through which to participate in party decision
making from within the sociocultural restrictions on their movement and
on the basis of the adjudication of their input by their male peers, and not
from a position of equality.

Shifting ICT Use from Solace-Seeking to Self-Determination

The following two examples illustrate a degree of change in established

gender norms and hierarchies achieved through participatory processes in
which the research participants come to identify and act upon changes that
increase their level of self-determination. This third research example pro-
vides a tangible illustration of the complex relationship between experienc-
ing as liberating certain ICT spaces that perpetuate inequitable values, and
the process of actually extricating oneself from that apparent freedom to
reach greater self-determination. The point is to again illustrate the com-
plexities of ICT access, use, and integration into emancipatory agendas.
Such understandings are not only informative for communication policies,
but also for increasing (hopefully) such policy’s efficacy.
In this research by Dr. Mervat Foda and Anne Webb, based on Foda’s
research in Cairo, young women who feel alone, unworthy, and ashamed
and are unhappy with their body image find solace in the use of online
spaces. Online, they can communicate with virtual friends who do not
know what they look like and who accept them for who they are and how
they present themselves. There are many reasons for the young ­women’s
attraction to this relatively safe—in their experience—space. It is a space
where they are free from the social and cultural pressures girls and women
face to hide their emotions and feelings, and from experiencing a lack
of self-determination and dignity, as society predetermined the behav-
ior required of “good girls.” “According to Appadurai,30 for those whose

29. Ibid., 77.

30. Appadurai, 63.

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 468 JOURNAL OF INFORMATION POLICY

self-determination is undermined, ‘one of their gravest lacks is the lack of

resources with which to give “voice”, that is, to express their views and get
results skewed to their own welfare.’”31 The online spaces gave these young
women such freedom to express themselves as they see themselves and
in their own interests—rather than as their society sees them—“without
breaking or challenging the criteria for social approval. Their way of using
ICT mitigated their suffering without taking issue with the social norms
that contributed to their silencing, disconnection from themselves and
their society and desire for invisibility. In this way these women’s technol-
ogy use sustained a detrimental status quo for them.”32
Through the research, an intervention space was created among the
research participants for sharing and building trust in person and through
connections online. The participatory research process provided the young
women, as well as the researchers, “with an arena within which to ‘rehearse
for reality’ the alternative social interactions they” were exploring,33 bring-
ing together consciousness-raising and safe physical space. As reported by
Foda: “we all experienced a wonderful sense of freedom.”34
According to Foda and Webb,

after some time the young women started to put less emphasis on
the interpretation of external appearances and more on their inner
strengths and nature and on the beauty of being and feeling a com-
plete person. They found themselves shifting from feeling uncared
for, alone and seeking invisibility to increasingly caring for themselves
and being prepared to become visible and show a self they take pride
in. They became more comfortable with sharing from this position
of self-knowing, seeing themselves for more than their stigmatized
body image and lifting themselves out of the limiting and regressive
expectations of “good girls” and self-denying invisibility. This recog-
nition permits them to move beyond their loyalty and attachment
to the discriminatory beliefs that inhibit them and beyond their pre-
vious need for invisibility, potentially pushing the highly limiting
boundaries of social acceptance, particularly for Egyptian women.35

31. Foda and Webb, 123.

32. Ibid., 131.
33. Kesby, 2039.
34. Foda and Webb, 128.
35. Ibid., 129.

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 Information and Communication Technology 469

Through the research process and self-determined on- and offline spaces, the
young women were able to explore beyond their “fairly deep moral attach-
ment to norms and beliefs that directly support their own degradation.”36

Transgressing Gender Norms

Another researcher in Egypt, Dr. Saneya El-Neshawy, explored women

farmers’ use of communication tools to access information in combination
with a focus on their identification of what was needed to overcome the
hegemonic norms of society that sustained and normalized women’s loss
of control over their own agricultural land. Their productive cultivation of
their land is their means of securing their livelihood as well as their self-­
determination and actualization of their capacities and agency. According
to El-Neshawy,

without control over land management, women become vulnerable,

deprived of their rights and dependent on key males in their fam-
ilies. This leads to men holding increased power in the family and
community and women’s lowered sense of self-worth. Furthermore,
due to the gendered social and cultural norms, women have limited
engagement in community politics and restricted decision-­making
power, and thus limited influence on policies that subsequently
do not support their legal rights or priorities. Such limitations on
women are justified by a general acceptance of normalized male roles
and leadership.37

El-Neshawy’s research endeavored to find out how the women “could

enhance their self-confidence and self-determination as female farmers
to the point of questioning traditional male authority over their land
and taking the lead themselves as effective, productive and empow-
ered ­decision-making farmers of their own land.”38 Saneya designed
her research process such that the women participants identified and
accessed the technical information they needed to build their knowl-
edge and confidence in virtual (web-based extension) and in-person

36. Appadurai, 65.

37. El-Neshawy, 276.
38. Ibid., 277.

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 470 JOURNAL OF INFORMATION POLICY

spaces that the women determined and only they accessed. In addition
to coming together to access, discuss, and reflect on the online agri-
cultural information, they also implemented what they learned. “The
research process created opportunities for women farmers to connect
with each other . . . [This] allowed them to recognize shared problems,
obstacles and solutions concerning their land production and to share
the ways they went about convincing their male relatives to recognize
their capacity to manage their own land.”39 They sought to question and
diplomatically challenge, resist, and transgress historical alienating social
norms around land control without irreparably damaging and losing
their social/family network.
It was recognized that “having the capacity to manage one’s land would
not be sufficient for women to break away from the traditional norms of
their culture.”40 Saneya herself owns land that she had no control over,
as she had willingly left the control in the hands of a male relative as was
customary. She is an internationally renowned scholar in plant pathology.
She knows how to grow crops. She explains some of the challenges: “I
realized what worried me most and what I had to overcome was the fear
of confronting male authority. It was the first barrier I had to break; it
meant going against my own learnt and practised submission to existing
cultural norms in my community.”41 As Saneya and the women research
participants increased their comfort with change and their expertise, their
produce and revenue reflected their abilities. “Social norms that restricted
their success had to fall away. Their husbands recognized the value of their
contributions and the women themselves became more confident in their
know-how and more comfortable transgressing cultural norms that inhib-
ited their progress.”42 In essence, while the online access to specific infor-
mation met the technical knowledge needs of the women, situating that
learning in a context that encouraged recognition and increasing under-
standing of the multiple dimensions of change needed to transgress inhibi-
tions, and that was experienced as empowering by the women landowners,
created a learning space in which ICT utilization did not perpetuate pre-
dominant gender and power relations.

39. Ibid., 279.

40. Ibid., 277.
41. Ibid., 282.
42. Ibid., 285.

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 Information and Communication Technology 471

Conclusions

Clear policy directions are needed, but as the research examples illustrate,
the complexities facing those who seek to transform gender relations and
the subtle, diverse, and multidimensional forces that reinforce established
gender hierarchies and practices43 need to be recognized to the degree pos-
sible for deeply entrenched and persistent resistance to gender transforma-
tion to be understood. As noted by Parpart, Judith Butler points out that
“transforming gender requires staying on the edge of what we know, ques-
tioning our own certainties and through that, creating openness to risk that
permits ‘another way of knowing and living in the world’ . . . that expands
‘our capacity to imagine the human.’”44 This sort of approach is needed to
take us beyond visualizing change only within established norms, provided
possible paths to transformed gender relations are well informed by the
daily realities of lives, cultures, histories, and socioeconomic contexts.
As this article has set out to illustrate, gendered power relations and
practices are embedded in specific social, economic, political, and cultural
contexts that ICT and communication policies need to address. According
to Parpart, “there is no one shot solution to gender transformation nor are
solutions readily apparent. Individual change can seem like small drips
in the bucket of life, incapable of addressing broader issues of societal
and institutional change,”45 yet these examples help to concretize what we
need to think about and keep in mind when designing “frameworks and
strategies for the development and implementation of digital policies.”46
Such an approach is needed if these policies are to be gender-equitable and
empowering; that is, if they are to foster women’s equitable and empow-
ering “participation in communication and . . . mainstreaming of gender
across all sectors.”47
One important conclusion is that for women’s access to, use of, and
participation in the design and direction of ICT to contribute to their
equality and empowerment, we need to “critically examine, take into
account and change a range of commonly held assumptions and contex-
tual ­factors. . . . We cannot expect these tools, and the changes they bring,
to somehow undo long-standing relations of gender inequality unless there

43. Parpart, 383.

44. Butler, 228; Parpart, 391.
45. Parpart, 392.
46. Global Media Policy Panel Description.
47. Ibid.

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 472 JOURNAL OF INFORMATION POLICY

are conscious and effective efforts made to remove or change the sources
of that inequality.”48 As noted by Jensen,

the digital divides that have been diagnosed so far attest to the fact
that social fault lines have often been augmented rather than amelio-
rated by ICTs . . . All of these divides contain gender dimensions and
tend to underprivilege women of each social fraction in comparison
with the men in their group.49

The four examples in this article, drawn from the African and the Middle
Eastern context, illustrate, to varying degrees, what can be gained from
adopting gender-aware perspectives and methodologies to inform ICT
policy. The examples highlight that when limiting and inequitable norms
are contested both in our daily lives and in how we integrate elements
of information and communication, these tools, mediums, and modes of
communication and expression can contribute to our efforts to not only
resist dominant social/gender relations, but also to achieve growth, agency,
and liberty from normalized, undermining values and systems.
It seems there is a clear need for these types of understandings to be
integrated into policies and practices that counter the potential for com-
munication technologies to sustain a supposedly universal, yet detri-
mental status quo. Communication may perpetuate hegemonic values,
perspectives, power relations, and so forth, or be mobilized to challenge
dominant relations. These examples of the mobilization of ICTs in the
gender–ICT-empowerment nexus look at how the expectation that ICTs
can be an avenue for empowerment—let alone for independent think-
ing and ­resistance—needs to be combined with concerted well-informed
­gender-equality efforts for this potential to be realized and experienced. It
is clearly not a simple equation between ICTs and empowerment.
Moving forward with this understanding, there is also increasing inter-
est in and awareness of how the definitions we may have for equitable ben-
efits from and influence over ICT developments in the interests of equality
actually are “now being shaped and mediated by the specific character of
these technologies”50 to some degree. “Thus, some of the characteristics
of these technologies should be first clearly understood before jumping

48. Webb.
49. Jensen, 19.
50. Sarukkai, 53.

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 Information and Communication Technology 473

in with a naïve view that these technologies are great” for our goals. . . .
“[T]he origins of these technologies, the reasons for the development of
these technologies and the motivations that drive new developments in
these fields have very little to do with” the goals of the researchers cited
here.51 It is interesting to keep in mind that “these technologies are inher-
ently not democratic. The large number of users have very little say in
how these technologies develop or are used,”52 yet their characteristics are
co-constitutive of how we envision our goals. The possibility of connecting
with and viewing specifically designed agricultural information from the
location of a small agricultural community, or to complement in-person
time with online support from and communication with a specific group
of people becomes built into expectations and definitions of empowering
spaces and processes, for example. Thus not only does the use of ICT need
to be embedded in a women’s empowerment and equality agenda, but how
the activation of that agenda may be co-constituted by characteristics of
various ICTs requires close consideration and analysis.

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