Amidst the deadline for the 2030 Education Goals, the 2024 Gender Report on Girls on ICT Day (April 25) assesses progress towards achieving gender equality at all levels of education. While examples of stubborn exclusion remain, the report tells a positive story globally of women’s access to and attainment of education over the past two decades.
A companion to the 2023 GEM report, A Tool of Whose Norms?, this gender edition asks under what circumstances technology is helping gender equality in education. Sometimes technology can provide a lifeline for women.
Technology facilitates access to specific valuable content, such as comprehensive sexuality education, access to which is often restricted. But in calling for technology to be 'on its terms’, the report challenges countries to consider when technology threatens the idea of a safe learning environment, and whether the design of certain technologies perpetuates negative social norms and gender stereotypes in children’s everyday lives. Lives.
The extent to which girls in the early years are encouraged and empowered to develop their mathematical skills to take them into science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) courses and eventually careers is suggested as key to ensuring technology design works. For everyone in the future. The report says that education has a key role to play in determining whether or not the future direction digital transformation takes us is gender balanced.
