Putting a spotlight on girls and digital!

Volume 10, Issue 4

Gender and Mobiles Newsletter

Note from the Editors

Who run the world? Girls!

In the gender and ICT world, adolescent girls often take a backseat compared to adult women - there is comparatively very data on girls under 18 and their access to and use of technology, and they are often harder to reach than adult women. So we’re very excited to have several stories focusing on adolescent girls and digital this month - a digital period tracker just for girls, digital skills for girls, and sex-disaggregated data on girls under the age of 18!

Do you have any great stories on digital solutions for adolescent girls? Let us know on Twitter: @rondaz_g and @alex_tyers!

- Ronda and Alex

Must reads

Oky: a digital period tracker for girls, by girls

What if adolescent girls could have access to evidence-based information about their periods in fun, creative and positive ways, delivered straight into their hands through the tools they use every day — mobile phones?

Well, now they can, thanks to Oky, the world’s first digital period tracker designed for and with girls in emerging markets. Created by UNICEF (our newsletter co-editor Alex is the product manager), Oky is built to girls’ digital realities as a gamified, light-weight mobile app for low-end Android phones. Oky has gone live in the pilot markets of Mongolia and Indonesia, and is due to deploy in Kenya and other markets later in 2020.

Find out more about Oky here!

Digital skills for Jack but what about Jill?

In this report from UNESCO, we see that the more things technologically change, the more they stay the same. Despite years of calls to ban digital devices from schools, recommendations are made to embed ICTs in schools and create safe spaces where girls and women can collaboratively learn. Most importantly: parents, allies, and technological autonomy can help bridge this gap. Read more here.

Using big data to understand the digital gender gap

It’s no secret that sex-disaggregated data on women’s ICT access and use is still limited - especially for adolescent girls under the age of 18.

The University of Oxford, in partnership with Qatar Computing Research Institute, has been using big data from Google and Facebook online advertising advertising platforms to help plug this data gap - and there is also data available for girls under 18.

You can read more here.

New data points and research!

A4AI: Meaningful Connectivity Standard

The new Meaningful Connectivity Standard from the Alliance for Affordable Internet is a huge leap forward in our eyes in understanding and measuring women’s meaningful access and use of ICT - when users can use the internet every day using an appropriate device with enough data and a fast connection. It is currently being built out, but it will have gender indicators. Find out more here!

CDRs: the next gender digital data frontier

Data 2x has developed an innovative report drawn from data generated by mobile phone usage, and call detail records (CDRs) specifically. The research outfit found that CDRs can predict net enrollment rates of schoolchildren in Pakistan. Read more here.

Women and mobile: how much closer to equal access?

The GSMA has published its 2020 Mobile Gender Gap Report and, much like the findings from UNESCO's gender digital skills gap: not much has changed and in some areas things have worsened. The likelihood that women use the mobile internet when compared to men has fallen 7% since 2017.