When a woman in a remote fishing village in Pondicherry logs into a local information kiosk to check grain prices, or a female entrepreneur in Bangladesh uses a mobile phone to serve her entire community – something significant is happening. Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) have transformed the movement of information and knowledge worldwide, and for women, this transformation carries particular weight. ICTs are not just tools of convenience – for millions of women globally, they are instruments of economic participation, legal awareness, and social visibility. This post explores exactly how ICTs benefit women across five interconnected dimensions: public opinion, economic opportunity, education, knowledge networking, and mindset change.
Table of Contents
Influencing public opinion and raising gender awareness
One of ICT’s most powerful but least visible roles is shaping how society perceives women. The internet, mobile platforms, and broadcast media allow gender equality advocates to reach audiences that traditional activism never could. United Nations intergovernmental processes have played a leading role over the past decade in identifying key issues and proposing strategic actions to enhance women’s empowerment through ICT – recognising that technology is not neutral. It reflects and can challenge existing power structures.
Through ICT, campaigns on gender-based violence, equal pay, and women’s political participation now spread rapidly across borders. Hashtag movements, digital petitions, and online journalism have forced issues that were once silenced into mainstream discourse. This horizontal flow of information – where anyone can publish and share – disrupts the top-down media structures that historically marginalised women’s voices. Women are no longer just subjects of news coverage; they are increasingly its producers and distributors.
Increasing economic opportunities for women
ICTs make trade easier by boosting information flow, reducing transaction costs, and eliminating barriers like distance – gains that are particularly significant for women-owned micro and small businesses. A woman entrepreneur no longer needs a physical shop in a prime location to reach customers. E-commerce platforms, social media marketing, and digital payment systems have fundamentally lowered the cost of doing business and expanded the geographic reach of even the smallest enterprises.
Real-world examples demonstrate this concretely. Self-employed women in India, Cambodia, and Peru have taken advantage of e-commerce’s economic prospects. In Bangladesh, women used Grameen Bank micro-loans to purchase mobile phones and rent airtime to fellow villagers – and then leveraged this income to open tea shops, gaining greater control over their earnings and increased status within their communities. These ventures show how a single ICT access point can trigger a chain of economic independence for women who previously had none.
Self-generated income from ICT businesses gives women greater power to close the gender wage gap, as it is a means of production that allows for some control and determination over the price they can charge for their services. Beyond micro-enterprise, ICTs have opened up formal employment sectors – telemarketing, data entry, medical transcription, and software development – that women can access from home, reducing the conflict between professional work and domestic responsibilities. This is especially significant where cultural norms restrict women’s physical mobility.
Education and knowing their rights
Access to education has historically been one of the most significant barriers to women’s empowerment. ICTs chip away at this barrier steadily. Allowing women to receive education via distance learning is one of the clearest ways ICTs can help increase gender equality. Radio and television – the older but still widely used ICTs – have long been vehicles for delivering health information, civic education, and vocational guidance to women in remote areas. Newer platforms like video conferencing, e-learning portals, and mobile-based courses extend this further.
Equally important is legal literacy. Many women, particularly in rural and low-income settings, are unaware of their rights regarding property, inheritance, domestic violence, and political participation. ICTs change this. Telecentre-based programmes in Latin America provided women with legal education on domestic violence, human rights, and self-esteem – helping them not only understand their rights but also build platforms to share this knowledge with other women. When women know what protections exist under the law, they are better positioned to claim them – in courts, community meetings, or conversations with local officials.
Access to ICTs provides women with employment opportunities, helps bridge the gender gap, raises awareness about education and healthcare, and contributes to ending violence against women. The three themes consistently identified in research – self-development, awareness of rights, and economic empowerment – are deeply interlinked, each reinforcing the others.
Engendering knowledge networks
Perhaps one of the most transformative aspects of ICT for women is the ability to connect – not just with information, but with each other. Knowledge networks built through ICT platforms allow women to share experiences, strategies, and support across geographical and social boundaries. This matters because isolation is one of the key mechanisms through which women’s disempowerment is maintained.
ICT-based networks provide safe spaces for communication and exchange that forge women’s solidarity. As a result, women strengthen each other in their learning and sharing, knowing they are no longer alone or isolated. Community radio stations, telecentres, and online forums make this possible even in areas with limited internet connectivity, using convergence technologies that blend broadcast and digital media.
In India, the Self Employed Women’s Association (SEWA) – which has been organising women in the informal sector since 1972 – was one of the first organisations globally to recognise the potential of ICTs for productive growth in the informal sector. It established Technology Information Centres across 11 districts of Gujarat to build the digital capacities of its members across various cooperatives. Community radio programmes and local-language content further extend these networks to women who are not yet literate, allowing the benefits of shared knowledge to bypass the literacy barrier. Low-cost communication, the ability to share best practices, and the capacity to reach previously unreached women are the defining advantages of these ICT-enabled knowledge networks.
A window to the world and new employment pathways
ICT gives women direct, largely uncensored access to information about the wider world – its cultures, economies, legal systems, and opportunities. This exposure has tangible consequences. When a woman in a conservative social environment can read about how women in other countries participate in politics, run businesses, or access healthcare, it challenges the assumption that her own circumstances are fixed or natural. Because ICTs allow for a greater flow of information, the growing availability and use of ICTs provides increased exposure to other cultures and communities’ customs, norms, and practices.
This window also opens onto new labour markets. Sectors like telemarketing, customer support, medical transcription, and software quality testing have become significant employers of women – particularly those who can work remotely. Digital mobile lifestyles and virtual workplaces with flexible schedules have emerged, and such arrangements are beneficial for women with childcare responsibilities. A new class of ICT-savvy women entrepreneurs has emerged globally – building businesses around digital content, online tutoring, e-commerce, and tech services – often starting with nothing more than a smartphone and an internet connection.
For women in poverty, ICT also offers a clearer understanding of the structural roots of their situation. Access to information about government schemes, market prices, legal entitlements, and agricultural practices allows them to make better decisions and advocate for themselves – rather than remaining dependent on gatekeepers who may not act in their interest.
Changing mindsets: the horizontal flow of information
Changing individual mindsets – both men’s and women’s – is one of ICT’s subtler but lasting contributions to gender equality. When information flows horizontally rather than through a single authoritative source, it becomes harder to sustain distorted views about women’s roles and capabilities. Men who can see, through news, documentary content, and social media, that women in other communities are skilled professionals, effective leaders, and productive economic contributors are confronted with evidence that contradicts limiting stereotypes.
A landmark example of this mindset-shifting potential is India’s Information Villages project in Pondicherry. Initiated by the M.S. Swaminathan Research Foundation (MSSRF), information shops equipped with computers, telephones, and dial-up connectivity were established across villages in Pondicherry, Southern India. Information was downloaded from the internet and transformed into locally specific, relevant content that directly benefited villagers – including daily news, agricultural crop prices, weather reports, and government programme details.
In each village, small groups of women volunteers – recruited by their fellow residents – were trained to run local internet kiosks, making them the primary local knowledge providers in their communities. This gave women both a visible productive role and a new level of status and influence. The Information centres maintained databases through which women could access information on agricultural concerns, general hygiene, employment, income-generating opportunities, entitlements for rural families, grain prices, seed and fertiliser information, and insurance schemes. The project won the Stockholm Challenge Award in 2001 in the Global Village category – a recognition of its participatory, gender-sensitive approach to ICT access.
What made this project distinctive was not just the technology, but the design philosophy: the community shaped the content, and women were central to its delivery. It is a model that demonstrates what ICT for women’s empowerment can look like when it is built with – not just for – the people it serves.
The broader picture
For women the world over, ICTs can be leveraged for personal security, better access to education and jobs, financial inclusion, and access to basic healthcare information. The UN’s Sustainable Development Goal 5 specifically calls for the use of enabling technology – ICTs in particular – to promote the empowerment of women, acknowledging that the digital divide is a gender issue as much as it is an economic one. The benefits of ICT for women are real and well-documented – but they are not automatic. They depend on deliberate design, inclusive access, relevant local content, and a recognition that technology without equity is just another form of exclusion.
What do you think? In communities where cultural norms restrict women’s mobility and access to public spaces, can digital tools alone create meaningful empowerment – or does social change have to come first? And as ICTs continue to evolve rapidly, who bears the responsibility for ensuring women in low-income and rural settings are not left behind?
References
- https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10115608/
- https://www.un.org/womenwatch/daw/public/w2000-09.05-ict-e.pdf
- https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Gender_and_ICT/Placing_Women%27s_Empowerment_Back_Into_the_Gender_Equality_Framework
- https://www.unwomen.org/en/news/stories/2013/9/ed-speech-to-broadband-gender-group
- https://www.comminit.com/global-alliance/content/empowering-women-through-ict
- https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0277539525000068
- https://documents1.worldbank.org/curated/en/107871468040601362/pdf/514570WP0IN0MS10Box342028B01PUBLIC1.pdf
- https://ras.org.in/articles/316/text/article.html
- https://egyankosh.ac.in/bitstream/123456789/25936/1/Unit-23.pdf
- https://iccwbo.org/news-publications/news/3-reasons-ict-matters-gender-equality/
- https://sdgs.un.org/goals/goal5
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