Women’s Rights Online

The economic costs of digital exclusion in South Asia: 7 Takeaways

June 28, 2022

The Costs of Exclusion research series has a message for broadband policymakers: the digital gender gap is real, it’s sexist, and it’s costing all of us over a trillion in lost economicRead more

Celebrating the Women’s Rights Online Network’s Achievements in 2021

March 8, 2022

This post was written by Dianne Olivan, the Web Foundation’s Gender Engagement and Policy Officer.

Women’s Rights Online Digital Gender Gap Audit Scorecards

October 5, 2022

Information and communications technologies (ICTs) are powerful tools for achieving everything from enhanced incomes and wider access to credit, to qualityRead more

Gender and ICT Policy Playbook

September 12, 2022

Today, the internet mirrors the good and the bad in our societies. Unfortunately this means that it also mirrors and magnifies existing social cultural and economic inequalities, includingRead more

More About This Project

Internet access offers a powerful avenue for people around the world to assert their rights and to claim social, economic and political opportunities for empowerment. Yet, half the world’s population remains offline — most of them women, and most in developing countries. Recent research shows that this persistent, pernicious digital gender gap is worsening — a fact that threatens to deepen existing inequalities and to undermine global development as the benefits of technological change are captured primarily by men. Our Women’s Rights Online network is working to reverse this trend by focusing its efforts on impacting the policy needed to bridge the gender gap in technology, data, and policymaking. Comprising women’s rights and digital rights groups across 17 low- and middle-income countries, the network wants to see evidence-based national ICT and gender plans established in at least seven new countries within the next five years.