Empowering Women in the Knowledge Society: Challenges and Opportunities

The shift to a knowledge society – one driven by information, digital connectivity, and intellectual capital – holds transformative promise for women worldwide. For the first time in history, economic participation does not depend primarily on physical strength, inherited property, or proximity to industrial centres. In theory, a woman with a smartphone and reliable internet access can run a business, attend a university course, or consult a doctor – all without leaving her home. Yet the reality is far more uneven. While the knowledge society creates genuine new pathways for women, deep-rooted structural barriers continue to limit who actually benefits, and by how much. Understanding both sides of this equation is essential to building a more equitable digital future.

What the knowledge society means for women 🔗

A knowledge society is one in which the creation, sharing, and application of knowledge is the primary engine of economic growth and social development. According to the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), when women and girls gain access to digital tools like mobile phones and the internet, they can start businesses, pursue education, seek employment, and access essential health and financial services – improvements that benefit not just individuals but entire communities. This is the fundamental argument for why women’s full participation in the knowledge society is not a matter of charity but of economic necessity.

The OECD Digital Economy Outlook 2024 puts this plainly: digital transformation offers women and girls “leapfrog” opportunities to earn additional income, enhance employment prospects, and access knowledge that can help bridge longstanding gender divides. The internet, online platforms, mobile phones, and digital financial services are the tools making this possible. The key question, however, is whether women can actually reach and use these tools on equal terms.

New job opportunities in ICT-enabled services 🔗

One of the most visible impacts of the knowledge economy on women has been the growth of employment in ICT-enabled services. This expansion goes well beyond software development and covers a broad range of sectors that women have entered in significant numbers globally.

Business process outsourcing (BPO) 🔗

The BPO sector – encompassing customer service, technical support, and data processing – has been a significant employer of women in developing nations. These roles often offer better wages and more formal working conditions than traditional agricultural or manufacturing jobs. In many South and Southeast Asian economies, BPO work has become a major entry point for educated women entering the formal workforce for the first time.

Knowledge process outsourcing (KPO) 🔗

Moving further up the value chain, KPO work involves specialised tasks such as legal transcription, market research, medical diagnostics, and financial analysis. These knowledge-intensive roles offer higher career mobility and better compensation for women with professional qualifications, particularly in countries with strong English-language education systems.

Teleworking and flexible employment 🔗

Perhaps the most structural shift brought by ICT is the separation of work from physical location. Remote and flexible work arrangements have been particularly valuable for women who bear a disproportionate share of domestic and caregiving responsibilities. The ability to contribute professionally without sacrificing family obligations has drawn many women into the knowledge workforce who might otherwise have remained outside it. A World Bank report on digital jobs for youth confirms that ICT creates employment opportunities across a spectrum – from ICT-intensive roles requiring specialist skills, to ICT-dependent and ICT-enhanced jobs across virtually every sector of the economy.

The entrepreneurial opportunity 🔗

Beyond employment, the knowledge society has opened significant space for women-led entrepreneurship. E-commerce platforms, digital payment systems, and social media marketing tools have lowered the cost and complexity of starting a business. A woman in a rural area can now sell handicrafts to international customers, offer consulting services remotely, or build a following for a home-based food business – possibilities that simply did not exist two decades ago.

The ILO’s Women in Digital Business (WIDB) initiative, developed in partnership with the ILO Training Centre and Microsoft Philanthropies, directly targets this opportunity. The programme builds digital and entrepreneurial skills for women business owners, covering digital literacy, marketing, accounting, artificial intelligence, and cybersecurity. It uses a train-the-trainer model to extend its reach into remote communities – addressing the reality that many women entrepreneurs lack not just capital but fundamental digital skills.

UNIDO’s 2024 World Women’s Forum on women entrepreneurs in the digital economy highlighted specific challenges women face, especially in rural areas: limited access to infrastructure, gaps in digital literacy and technical skills, and restricted entry into global markets. The forum also pointed to a promising model – clustering micro and small women-led businesses to leverage shared resources, improve competitiveness, and create stronger supply chains. Critically, the OECD notes that across member countries, women start significantly fewer ICT businesses and contribute to far fewer ICT-related patents – meaning the entrepreneurial potential of women in the knowledge economy remains substantially untapped.

The gender digital divide: the challenge that cuts across all opportunities 🔗

None of these opportunities translate into reality without addressing what researchers call the gender digital divide – the systematic gap between men and women in their access to, use of, and ability to benefit from digital technologies. According to research compiled by Wikipedia’s gender digital divide entry, this divide encompasses disparities in digital skills, internet access, representation in computing and STEM fields, and exposure to gender-biased technologies such as artificial intelligence. It is shaped by socioeconomic, cultural, and educational factors and is most severe for women who are older, less educated, economically poor, or living in rural areas of developing countries.

The access gap 🔗

In many parts of the world, women are significantly less likely than men to own a mobile phone or have internet access. Data shows that in sub-Saharan Africa, the internet penetration rate in 2019 stood at about 33.8% for men compared to just 22.6% for women. The gender gap in internet penetration reaches around 17% across the Arab States and Asia-Pacific regions. Women in patriarchal societies often face additional barriers including unsafe roads, restrictions on freedom of movement, and lack of financial independence – making even reaching a public ICT facility a challenge.

The skills gap – a deeper problem than access 🔗

Crucially, as device prices have fallen globally, skills deficits have overtaken access as the primary driver of the gender digital divide. Research across 10 low- and middle-income countries found that women were 1.6 times more likely than men to report lack of skills as a barrier to internet use. UNESCO estimates that men are around four times more likely than women to have advanced ICT skills, such as the ability to program computers. Women in numerous countries are also 25% less likely than men to know how to use ICT for basic tasks, such as using simple arithmetic formulas in a spreadsheet. Research by WISAT (Women in Science and Technology) further demonstrated that women’s rates of internet access and use do not automatically rise even as national internet penetration improves – meaning that without targeted intervention, the skills gap can persist or widen even as infrastructure improves.

The education and STEM pipeline problem 🔗

The skills gap does not emerge in adulthood. It begins much earlier, in the way girls are educated and the choices they are channelled toward. Research published in the International Journal of Technology and Design Education found that fewer female students choose STEM studies, with girls more likely to prefer health and education professions while boys gravitate toward engineering and computer science. Gender stereotypes that take root as early as elementary school discourage girls from seeing themselves as capable in mathematics and science – shaping entire career trajectories. A 2024 study published in Frontiers in Education noted that ICT specialist roles in the European Union consist of only about 17.9% women, and that despite the growing digital market, the number of women pursuing ICT education has actually been declining. This is both an equity failure and an economic one: EU estimates suggest that an annual productivity loss of around 16 billion euros results from women leaving their STEM jobs.

Structural and social barriers beyond the classroom 🔗

Even when women do acquire education and skills, structural and social barriers continue to limit their full participation in the knowledge economy. In many households, internet-enabled devices are shared, with men given priority access. Cultural norms in some societies actively discourage women from using technology independently or participating in online professional spaces. Online harassment and cyberbullying disproportionately target women, adding a safety dimension to digital exclusion that is rarely faced by men to the same degree.

In the workplace, the World Economic Forum notes that women comprise less than one-third of global information technology industry employees and only 22% of artificial intelligence professionals. The American Association of University Women (AAUW) reports that women make up just 26% of the STEM workforce overall, and those who do enter the field face higher rates of gender-based discrimination and hostile workplace climates. Caregiving burdens – which remain disproportionately assigned to women – also push many out of demanding technology careers mid-career.

There is also the issue of who designs the technology. As the ITU has estimated, only about 6% of professional software developers globally are women. Technologies developed by male-dominated teams often embed gender biases – from facial recognition systems that perform poorly on female faces to AI assistants that replicate cultural stereotypes. Women’s exclusion from technology design thus has real downstream consequences for how tools function and who they serve.

Policy responses and pathways forward 🔗

Addressing these interlocking challenges requires coordinated action at multiple levels. The ITU’s EQUALS Global Partnership – founded in 2016 by ITU, UN Women, the International Trade Centre, and the mobile industry body GSMA – brings together over 100 public and private sector actors to expand women’s access, leadership, and knowledge in the digital space. The ITU also runs Girls in ICT Day annually, through which over 377,000 girls and young women across 171 countries have been introduced to ICT as a potential career path since 2011.

At the national level, targeted programmes are showing results. Mexico’s Digital Skills for Women programme, a collaboration between CISCO and the Ministry of Labour, offers free online courses for women over 16 – covering everything from basic computer use to programming in Python and JavaScript. The OECD recommends a three-pronged policy framework: closing the ICT skills gap through targeted education, promoting female entrepreneurship through access to finance, and catalysing female ICT innovation and patents.

The World Economic Forum emphasises that solutions must be localised – what works in Sweden may not work in Bangladesh. In some regions, the priority is tackling stereotypes that steer girls away from science. In others, it is physical infrastructure and safety. Mentorship matters too: evidence shows that when girls can see women succeeding in technical fields, their own likelihood of pursuing those fields rises significantly. The European Parliament’s study on the digital gender gap stresses that interventions must not be limited to formal schooling but must embrace informal learning environments – homes, communities, and workplaces – and adopt a lifelong learning approach, since digital skills require regular updating as technology changes.

Why this matters for the whole economy 🔗

The case for women’s full inclusion in the knowledge society is not purely a moral one, though it is certainly that. It is also an economic argument. The WEF notes that companies where female representation exceeds 30% are significantly more likely to financially outperform those with lower representation. Gender-diverse research and development teams are also more likely to bring new innovations to market. Research published in ScienceDirect argues that given women’s demonstrated engagement with ICT tools when given equitable access, the gender digital divide should be understood not just as a problem but as an opportunity: digital technologies represent a concrete pathway to tackling longstanding inequalities in employment, income, education, and healthcare for women in developing countries.

The knowledge society will not automatically deliver gender equality. It will deliver equality only when the conditions that enable women to participate – education, skills, affordable access, safe online environments, and freedom from discriminatory social norms – are actively built and sustained. The transition is already underway. Whether it widens or narrows existing gender gaps depends entirely on the choices made now by governments, institutions, technology companies, and communities.

What do you think? As the knowledge economy continues to expand, which barrier – access to technology, skills training, or social and cultural norms – do you believe is the most urgent to address for women in developing countries? And given that technologies are often built by male-dominated teams, how should the global tech industry rethink its approach to inclusive design?

References

1. https://www.itu.int/hub/2025/05/wtisd-25-gender-equality-in-digital-transformation/
2. https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/2024/11/oecd-digital-economy-outlook-2024-volume-2_9b2801fc/full-report/the-potential-of-women-for-digital-innovation_83bc2ba5.html
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5. https://www.unido.org/news/unlocking-opportunities-women-entrepreneurs-digital-economy-key-takeaways-world-womens-forum-2024
6. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_digital_divide
7. https://wisat.org/what-we-do/gender-equality-knowledge-society/
8. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9628581/
9. https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/education/articles/10.3389/feduc.2024.1352029/full
10. https://www.weforum.org/stories/2025/01/why-it-s-time-to-use-reskilling-to-unlock-women-s-stem-potential/
11. https://www.aauw.org/issues/education/stem/
12. https://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes/STUD/2018/604940/IPOL_STU(2018)604940_EN.pdf
13. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0277539511001099