Women x Tech: Intermediaries, Design and Literacy in low resource settings

In urban India, 52% of women have ever used the internet, compared to 72% of men (NFHS, 2021). The gender digital divide, –differential access to ICTs, has hampered women’s ability to participate meaningfully in the digital world because women remain at a disadvantage in terms of digital literacy and confidence (UNICEF, 2023). Women face discouragement and risk acrimony and ridicule from their family families when approaching new services as they are perceived as less experienced in worldly affairs and susceptible to fraud (LIRNEasia, 2022). This leaves women outside the digital with no helping hands to usher them into opportunities it presents.

Secondary data, market research and IIHS’s our previous work on Indian women’s digital livelihoods including a 3-year long study on women’s in India’s platform economy, inform us that unlike the imagined ideal single-user of technology– Women exist within relational power structures and outside this imagination of the ideal single-user of technology. This leads to poor user experience resulting in trust deficits, lower adoption and drop-outs from digital platforms and services. In this context, we seek to measuring women’s device ownership, shared usage, and whether trust and literacy is are shared attributes as well. Shared literacy and trust are potential pathways to design interventions around accelerate women’s make the uptake of e-government services, or digital services accessed through from digital public infrastructure more successful amongst women, be it in livelihoods, health, or other sectors.

A meaningful site to understand the uptake, hesitation and mediators  adoption of digital services by of women users and factors influencing usage  is in the digital transformation of the labour market. In India and the Global South, women’s work has largely been concentrated in the informal economy, in sectors such as domestic work, small manufacturing, street-vending and home-based work. The digital transformation and platformization of these labour market options has been slower than in male-dominated sectors, both of work both in formal (business process management, medical consultation, and legal services) and informal sectors (taxi, delivery, and logistics) of the economy. Platformization has not been strong in sectors of the informal economy where women work, such as domestic work, small manufacturing units, street-vending and home-based work. The question of women's economic empowerment from the digital economy is being stemmed because women users are not ready for digital opportunities, or the digital opportunities do not understand women’s needs and behaviour.

IIHS, led by me, conducted a learning study on women’s independent and aided use of digital and platform services to explore how different kinds of mediators in women’s lives impact the awareness, uptake and successful usage of e-government and commercial digital platforms. By measuring the relationship to mediators, what trust they embody, and how often women go to them we focused on three3 key pillars of Gender Equality and  understanding dDigital cConnectivity:  areas Accessibility, Digital Literacy and Norms.

The study examined women’s digital literacy and confidence with a focus on their independent or aided use of  smartphones, and their ability to successfully use digital platforms such as Youtube, WhatsAapp for communications or payment applications like Gpay or PhonePe in their liveilhoods. Lastly, we explored people, and organisations forms that create or bypass social norms governing of device and account sharing (a key feature of existing digital practices in India - is dictated by economic constraints and cultural values), reservations regarding online transactions (issues of trust, and attitudes towards online frauds), and help-seeking patterns of women etc.We located our problem space within existing studies from HCI, professional experience from industry-based UX research, development sector practice and studies on women’s informal livelihoods.

Research objectives: 1. Investigate the practices of women’s device ownership and platform usage individually and within the household.

2. Examine Investigate the role of mediators  in building creating trust in women’s interactions with digital and offline services (both shared and individual access) and their role in women being end-users of digital and platform services.

3. To Adapt women’s behaviours around trust and safety to new digital open ecosystems whose governance structures are being developed to encourage women’s empowering and sustained usage of technology.

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