3.2.1. Strengthening institutional guarantees for women’s right to participation

Cutting-edge portals and technology platforms for citizen engagement cannot automatically further gender-responsive participation cultures in governance systems. Towards this, there needs to be sustained investment to put in place institutional guarantees that protect and promote women’s right to participation. Pre-digital legislation pertaining to citizens’ right to information, right to free expression, right to privacy, right to quality public services, right to participate etc. may not adequately address new issues/challenges for women’s inclusion in digitally-mediated citizen engagement contexts (IT for Change 2017)17. Therefore, they should be reviewed and suitably amended so that they are brought up to speed with emerging digital realities, as detailed below:

1. Right to information: Open data efforts should be recognised as being integral to furthering right to information in the digital age. Therefore, in contexts where robust legislation on freedom of information exists, open data protocols need to be harmonised with legacy laws. In other contexts where such legislation is absent, it is important to fill this gap. For example in the Philippines, the enactment of a freedom of information law has been delayed. However, since 2011, the government has embraced the open data agenda through the Open Government Partnership (Garcia et al, 2017, cited in IT for Change 2017)18. Therefore, to ensure that progress on open data is not impeded by the absence of legal provisions for proactive disclosure of governance data, a Presidential Executive Order has been issued for operationalising those aspects of the right to information pertaining to the executive branch.

   However, to ensure effective realisation of women’s right to information in digital times, the harmonisation of open data and right to information frameworks is only a first step. Governments need to go one step further, by making open data protocols gender-responsive and ensuring that public interest considerations of transparency and women’s right to privacy are carefully balanced. More details in Section 2.2.2, Unit 2.2.

2. Right to free expression: Legislative guarantees for free speech should recognise the contextual differences in offline and online communication environments, and should be tailored accordingly. This becomes important particularly in terms of ensuring women’s freedom of expression in online spaces (e-participation forums as well as the digital public sphere at large). For example, older institutional frameworks may offer no protection against online trolling or doxing. Therefore, framing robust legal-institutional responses to e-VAW and gender-based hate speech online is an urgent imperative to enshrine women’s right to free expression online. See Unit 4.2 for more details.

3. Right to privacy:  Privacy and free expression are mutually reinforcing rights. And without privacy, “individuals lack the space to think and speak without intrusion and to develop their own voice”. For individuals who are already disadvantaged by their race, class, gender or other socio-structural location factors, anonymity and confidentiality of personal information is essential to voice their perspectives freely and openly, without fear of reprisal/social backlash by powerful sections of society.

   As specified in Unit 2.2, any data collection by government agencies, whether in the course of e-service delivery or for e-participation, should be undertaken only in accordance with clearly defined data protection guidelines that recognise a ‘right to privacy’ standpoint. Additionally, in the case of citizen engagement portals/platforms, the concepts of ‘privacy by design’ and ‘privacy by default’ enshrined in the EU General Data Protection Regulation, are extremely useful to adopt, as general design guidelines:

   Privacy by design: When any government agency collects personal data of citizens as part of a digitally-mediated citizen engagement process, it should put in place comprehensive personal data protection measures for the whole life-cycle of the process, and not just at the point of collection.

   Privacy by default: On all governmental websites and portals, the default settings should be at the strictest privacy level. The user should be clearly intimated and informed consent obtained for the collection of online personal identifiers such as IP addresses and cookie notifications, for customisation of services.

4. Service delivery guarantees: In the transition to digitalised service delivery, the right of citizens from vulnerable groups to shape the design of public services needs to be safeguarded. It is vital that choices about channels through which services are delivered are kept open, and citizen charters are introduced for continuous feedback and about the services. For more details, see the discussion on eCitizen charters and women’s inclusion in e-government systems in Ingredient 1, Unit 2.2.
5. Participation guarantees: As highlighted by the UN E-government Survey 2016, governments continue to face difficulties in ensuring that citizen voice channelled through e-consultation processes leads to binding policy outcomes. Partly, this is difficult to realise because of the tensions between direct participation and outcomes of deliberations/ discussions by legislative bodies comprising elected representatives. For example, in Brazil, the draft of the Marco Civil Da Internet/Internet Bill of Rights legislation that was prepared through an online citizen consultation process by officials of the Ministry of Culture was altered by Parliament, due to last-minute industry lobbying. Thus, the final text of the Bill was not a true reflection of the e-consultation process. This interplay between direct participation and representative decision-making is part of the essence of democracy. Nevertheless, it is important to institute a guideline for ‘report-back’ at the end of consultative processes, which explains to citizens the rationale guiding final decisions. This can incentivise groups that are relatively less visible in the public sphere to continue to participate (IT for Change 2017)19.

Another challenge to the right to participate emerges from the use of algorithmic decision making techniques by governments to design public policy priorities. Such automated decision making may discriminate against marginalised women by ignoring their concerns as their data footprints tend to be less, due to gender digital divides in access and use (Data 2x 2017)20. For example, records of calls made to a street harassment helpline can help in identifying city neighbourhoods where women feel unsafe. However, assigning police patrol resources to neighbourhoods only based on this data would be a mistake. Women from upper class groups may be more likely to call the helpline than women from disadvantaged groups, and as a result, there may be a complete set of priority locations that need patrolling, which may not be reflected from the call data. In this context, it may be useful to note Article 22 of the EU GDPR – “every data subject shall have the right not to be subject to a decision based solely on automated processing” (cited in Goodman and Flaxman 2016)21. The spirit of this provision, when applied to the field of data-supported decision-making, would mean that at all times, policymakers are cognisant that “While Big Data can throw light on ‘what is’, policy processes often depend also on ‘what should be’” (IT for Change 2016)22. Therefore, Big Data analysis of trends should aid, but not replace, the complex process of evaluating multiple public interest considerations in governance decision-making.

3.2.2. Investing in women’s digital capabilities

Building women’s digital capabilities is integral to ensuring their effective participation in digital governance systems.

The first step towards building women’s digital capabilities is to design and roll out national digital literacy programmes, with a well-defined women-directed component. The Republic of Korea has been successful in implementing such an approach, in the early 2000s. Between 2002-2006, the Ministry of Gender Equality established the Basic Plan for Promoting Women’s Informatisation (2002–2006), setting out an ambitious policy vision on women’s capacity to participate in the information society, and going one step forward from previous approaches on the gender digital divide that defined women’s role more passively. It ensured that this Plan was in sync with the Basic Plan on Women’s Policy – thus guaranteeing that digital literacy efforts were in sync with the women’s empowerment agenda. A striking feature of the women’s digital literacy programmes conducted under the Informatisation Plan was the effective segmentation of the target group – with separate initiatives directed at housewives, female immigrants (foreign brides), and women college students (UNPAN, accessed 2017)23.

Secondly, in curriculum design, it is important to ensure that digital literacy skills are positioned not as a narrow set of technical skills, but as a pathway through which women can exercise their active citizenship. The e-jalaakam initiative, developed by the Department of Economics, St. Teresa’s College in Ernakulam district of Kerala state, in India, in partnership with the Kerala State IT Mission, has been successful in this regard. The initiative, launched in 2012, has adopted a cascade model. Women undergraduate students of the college are trained as Master Trainers to conduct digital literacy trainings for women and girls in neighbourhood communities. The curriculum emphasises the importance of women and girls to access e-government services without intermediation by male members of their families, and positions digital literacy as a strategy towards realising citizen rights and entitlements (UNESCAP 2016)24.

Thirdly, the acquisition of digital literacy is not a one-time exercise. It is a gradual process through which a user becomes familiar with digital technologies and the Internet, and is able to leverage their potential for expanding her informational and communicative choices (WRO 2015)25. Therefore, digital literacy programmes should focus not just on technical literacy but also on expanding learners’ information and media literacy and data literacy. The following diagram outlines an elementary schema for these literacies.

For women and girls to make this journey to acquiring advanced digital capabilities, especially those from marginalised rural communities, the creation of gender-responsive public access points to support learning processes is necessary. See Module 4.2, Section 4.2.2, Ingredient 2 for more details.