The National Women’s Council of Catalonia (CNDC) has organized an event in the framework of the 67th edition of the Commission on the Legal and Social Status of Women (CSW, for its acronym in English). The event “Digital divide and feminist resistances on the internet” was held in a hybrid format, with participation in New York and also online.
The theme of the 67th CSW was “Innovation and technological change, education in the digital age to achieve gender equality and the empowerment of all women and girls”.
The event was opened by the Minister for Equality and Feminism, Tània Verge, who expressed the need to participate actively and in person again in order to continue building alliances within the framework of the CSW “explaining everything that the feminist movement brings to Catalonia, at the same time that you can also take away a lot of things, after everything you exchange with your colleagues and the political advocacy you have done”.
Recovering, therefore, the face-to-face event has been important for the Catalan feminist organizations that this year have moved back to the headquarters of the United Nations in New York, after 3 years of activity only online, due to the pandemic “The novelty of this year is that from the Government we are accompanying you to the CSW accredited, for the first time, as a regional government, a fact that highlights the importance of the government’s feminist policies and the work that we also want do at an international level”.
The second vice-president of the Council, Eugènia Bretones, and on behalf of the more than 400 entities that are part of this CNDC, highlighted the need to claim this year, on the occasion of the topic at hand, that “we want the inclusion of all women and girls in the ICT, not only as access to education, but a gender perspective in programming, in cultural programming, too, and a feminist online communication. We want women and girls to be visible in the tics without stereotypes or discourses or gender bias” And he also emphasized the need for the tics to be mindful of intersectionality, in order not to forget any woman.
The debate had the participation of four speakers and was moderated by the journalist, Alicia Oliver . It was developed in two blocks of interventions: on the one hand, to know the starting situation of each of the areas discussed; and the second block, to know the resistances and strategies necessary to reverse each of the situations that arose.
In the first place, Karina Gibert spoke, degree and doctorate in Computer Science and president of the Women’s Association COEinf, who explained that, although Catalonia is one of the most developed territories in the world, “we have problems of access and digital gap, both in terms of access to devices and knowledge.” And he gave some figures, like for example, that “in 2021 we had almost half of the vulnerable population without access to the internet, or that the lack of access to connections and devices is not equitably distributed among the population”. For this reason, elderly people and, above all, elderly women suffer a lot from these shortcomings, without forgetting people with low incomes, who also experience the same situation. And to these problems we must add, in addition, the lack of skills using as an example, that in Catalonia during the pandemic many people who needed financial aid could not apply for it because they did not know the tools.
Regarding artificial intelligence, he explained that it surrounds us in our day to day life and that it is undoubtedly a promising area in Catalonia since 13% of the Catalan GDP last year originated in this sector, and an annual growth of 5% is expected. “We are in a full employment sector where there are only 8.6% of female technologists in technical positions and where we have a huge lack of professionals. This past year there were 14,500 vacant places in Catalonia, which could not be filled. Therefore, it is a very large area of opportunity”.
From Catalonia, Cristina Pulido participated, professor and researcher in the Department of Journalism and Communication Sciences of the UAB and one of the coordinators of the Women and Media working group of the Council. Cristina mentioned Sustainable Development Goal number 5, and specifically, the point that deals with the elimination of all forms of violence against women and girls, as well as the work done by the group, stating that there are many recommendations and contributions, but “it is necessary to evaluate the social impact in order not to repeat mistakes and move forward”.
He also referred to the 2020 study Free to be on line?, where it was already gathered that 58% of young girls had experienced online harassment and that not everyone reports or reports about it, therefore, the real data is much larger. “One in four young people had the same psychological consequences as if they had experienced it physically, and one of the most worrying results is that this type of online harassment is silencing girls’ voices.”
Rosa Ma Rodríguez Quintanilla , one of the coordinators of the International Network of Journalists with a Gender Vision, spoke to us about the serious situation of violence experienced by the journalistic profession in Mexico where, obviously, this violence has a high gender component. “The digital space, social networks, and the internet constitute a special means to be able to express ourselves, inform us, communicate, and also, it must be said, it has facilitated our connection and the strengthening of the movement feminist”. But in Mexico, as in other countries, women are very exposed in the virtual space.
Digital platforms, she continued, have become facilitators of much of the online harassment against women journalists, and this violence generally has a very clear gender component, with threats of abuse, rape, exposure of images, invasion of privacy, defamation campaigns, also direct attacks against their families. And he recalled that digital violence against female journalists is an extension of the gender violence that is experienced daily, of the inequalities and structural discrimination that all countries face, and that it has also migrated to digital spaces. “These violences are suffered by us, in general but more cruelly by journalists, human rights defenders, women who participate in politics, and it is not by chance, it is the social and patriarchal context that continues to tell us that the public space is not for women”.
Thais Ruiz de Alda, founder and director of DigitalFems emphasized the lack of a gender perspective in data-based information, “sometimes there is data without differentiating sex or gender, and other times even though there is data that they do take this differentiation, they don’t have the gender perspective, and this gives us an incorrect reading of reality”. Adding that when talking about the technological world you need to have a lot of data to know what is really happening. “In general, there is a very large lack of women in the technological world, and this, which has already been said before, is very important.”
DigitalFems together with the Technology Women’s Commission of the technology sector have worked on the collection of data from the Catalan technology sector, for which they launched a survey aimed at the technology sector. With this data, they have produced a report that will be presented next week in Barcelona, which aims to give an overview of what is happening in Catalan technology companies for the purposes of female leadership in IT environments, and of the technical profiles that are developed in these companies . “We need to know how many women are creating technology, and also how Catalan companies are recruiting talent, according to the gender of the people, and we will have this information available from the presentation of the study.”
With regard to the blog on strategies to improve the situation, Karina Gibert stated that it is necessary to act from different areas: government, education sector, business sector, professional organizations, media, families… Among others, and from the government, he asked that all the information they need to be able to study women’s problems be included in the databases, in a systemic way, because it is not enough, as he said , by putting the gender of the person given that there are no other relevant indicators to study the problems of women related to the wage gap. “These data should be collected from the institutions, and we do the analysis and follow-up”. In the educational field, he talked about training teachers in the field of tics so that they can generate vocations in girls and boys, and “introducing computational thinking into children’s CVs, from a very young age, since to be digital citizen you must learn to have computational thinking”.
With respect to the media, Cristina Pulido pointed out the fundamental role they play in their socializing capacity and influence on how we learn what society is like, relationships, etc. and depending on the information treatment they do, they will promote harassment or, quite the opposite, creating spaces free of violence. The media, he continued, “must play a key role in breaking the silence and not in promoting this silence. Either you’re on the side of the victims or you’re on the side of the bullies, but you can’t be on both sides.”
For Rosa Ma Rodríguez Quintanilla, it is necessary to emphasize that digital platforms provide immediate access to data for judicial investigations into illegal content that put journalists and their families at risk; as the time factor can be the difference between life and death. “Anonymity must end when they commit illegal acts.” And he added that “as journalists what we do is to resist, accompany each other, weave networks of self-protection, solidarity networks of support. We are clear that this will never be enough, but I want to tell you that, with the experience we have had in Mexico, the networks save lives, and we have seen it on many occasions.
To reduce the digital divide and create a more feminist internet, according to Thais Ruiz de Alda “it is necessary, above all, to break gender stereotypes in digital and technological environments. And it is necessary to increase the participation of people who are not of the male gender, and to close this gap by encouraging the creation of technology”. He insisted on the idea that technology is a tool that can help us, “and if there is only one profile of people doing one type of technology, there will be many unmet needs”. Therefore, it must be more diverse, more functional and more useful.
The event was closed by Meritxell Benedí , president of the CNDC and the Catalan Women’s Institute (ICD), who highlighted the need for the Council to continue promoting these debates at a global level since, with nuances, the agenda shared is practically common. “We have a clear diagnosis, in the digital and virtual sphere the same thing happens as in the analogue and real sphere, but multiplied by the capacity of impact and influence that the digital sphere has”. And to add that “the strategies and resistance that feminists must adopt are self-protection, so that the networks accompany us, save lives, and also to urge regulation. I think that this is the great consensus that comes out of this act and that comes out of these days”.
Entities of the CNDC in the 67CSW
In this first face-to-face meeting, post-pandemic, representatives of different entities of the National Council of Women of Catalonia, such as the European Network of Women Journalists, the Association of Sexual and Reproductive Rights, the Institute of Inequalities, the Hélia Association, the Unitary Platform against Gender Violence, COEinf Women, DigitalFems and the Center for European Women’s Studies.
In addition to the event organized by the Council’s International Participation working group, and the own agenda of each of the entities, the representatives of the associations were also able to meet with the Government Delegation in the United States, who offered them a reception with the Catalan community that lives there in New York.
Some images of CNDC representatives
