Women as ‘Digital’ Subjects: Participating, Negotiating Vulnerabilities and Building Empowerment.

Asia in Global Affairs (AGA) in collaboration with SNDT Women’s  University(SNDTWU), Mumbai is currently working on an ICSSR project titled “Women as ‘Digital’ Subjects: Participating, Negotiating Vulnerabilities and  Building Empowerment”. The project explores the gendered dimensions of the  digital space in India in present times, aiming to foreground issues of  empowerment, freedom, self-sustainability and their obverse. It opens discussion on the gender binary which while being much less-talked about remains cardinal to the experiences of women digital users across the globe thus accentuating their experiences of disempowerment– this gender divide playing out through intricate crevices of denials and discriminations on the virtual platforms.

‘Disempowerment’ as the project hypothesizes, works through ‘forced’ as well as involuntary impediments that are both structural, perceptual and auto-induced. We  argue that the same indices can be probed and evaluated for alternative understandings of ‘Empowerment’. In other words, the project, while addressing  the gaping gender-divide that remains invisible yet strongly palpable across digital platforms, searches for the different ways in which women try to find their voice on and through the digital medium. The theoretical matrix is qualitative structured around ethnographic methods of interviewing, Focus Group Discussions, surveys conducted by governmental agencies and corporate bodies like Nielson and evaluation of existing literature on themes of e.governance, internet usage, women and ICT etc. to name a few. Through mixed social science methods the project thus attempts to map women participation across ages and varied income capacities in urban Kolkata and Mumbai and across various digital platforms, analyzing the different social, economic and political nuances of such participation. Focus on the digital phenomenon or the ‘Fourth Industrial Revolution’, concurrently highlights the crucial role played by cellphones and similar digital platforms in minimizing and ironically at the same time expanding the plethora of discriminations faced by women using these digital tools for various purposes—ranging from basic communication to accessing government benefits, registering their claims, banking etc. According to multiple scholars the root of the gender discrimination lies in digital illiteracy or lack of the necessary familiarity or education as they argue that with higher education levels, the extent of such discrimination becomes minimized.

The project attempts to evaluate such propositions and understandings by  reviewing the connection between education and the rising gender divide on the digital plane. A sizable section of women respondents aged between 18 and 55  years are selected from Kolkata and Mumbai from differentiated economic strata as reflected in their residential choices and locations, with an aim to juxtapose their  experiential realities against the theoretical hypothesization of gendered digital  space. While the discourse of empowerment remains a central piece of this research, it is assumed that ethnographic responses of the interviewees would problematize any unilateral understanding of the direct correlation between women empowerment and digital literacy or digital ability. Similarly trending and trolling remain important aspects of discussion as the project explores the various ways in which they affect the construction and validation of self on the digital platforms, thus raising significant questions like whether the ‘self’ constructed through such platform complements the actual ‘self’ and if there are overlaps or differences between the digital identity and non-virtual identity of women, so on and so forth. Through an incisive analysis and understanding of the need-based, entertainment or en-skilling activities of urban women participants of Kolkata and Mumbai,  functional across different digital platforms, the project makes an effort to highlight certain critical lacunae of this new medium that has revolutionized modes of communication and participation especially in this Covid 19 pandemic scenario and suggest measures to redress those in terms of the drafting of new policies to regulate the digital world. The principal quest of this research is thus embedded in a vision to actualize a digital world which can arguably address and considerably eradicate gender favoritisms practiced in kinship groups, communities and professional sectors within India and beyond, manifest in discriminatory digital practices.

(Project Outline drafted by Dr Somdatta Chakraborty, Senior Adjunct Researcher, AGA)