The Internet and women
As per available data,
India has 300 million
Internet users from a
population of 1.2 billion.
The country is the
second largest market
for Facebook and LinkedIn, while
there are over 55 million Youtube
users and over 18.1 million Twitter
users.
Yet, how many of these social
media netizens are women? And how
are women and their issues
represented in the vast, information
saturated Worldwide web? While
access and affordability continue to
remain major issues for all Internet
users, irrespective of gender, the
experiences of women who do use
the net have been mixed.
An excerpt from Sage Publication's
India Connected: Mapping The
Impact of New Media. Meera, one of the women
protagonists in the 2006
Nagesh Kukunoor film Dor, climbs a
mound in the middle of an open
space in Rajasthan and reaches out
for a mobile phone to make a
monthly phone call to her husband
in Saudi Arabia. While the scene ends
tragically, with the news of her
husband's death, the mobile phone
becomes a potent symbol of the
power of new media technology to
connect this simple village woman to
a larger world (Dor, 2006).
But the tragic and chilling death of
Ambika due to a malfunction in the
manual loader machine in Nokia's
mobile phone handset factory in
Sriperembudur in 2010, brought into
sharp and chilling focus the other
role of gender in the making of new
media (Dutta & Radhakrishnan,
2011). The Nokia factory, which
began in 2006, was then one of the
largest handset manufacturers in the
world and employed over 7,000
people, 70 percent of whom were women. Recruited from the
neighboring villages and towns, the
young women were seen as a
privileged lot as they were given
training, transport, and crèche
facilities and a substantially higher
salary than that of an agricultural
laborer. Nokia, unable to keep up
with a changing market, gave way to
Samsung and was bought over by
Microsoft. The factory closed down in
2014 and for the women,
unemployment and poverty once
again circumscribed their lives.
The story of the access women
have to new media can be located in
these two narratives—that of the promise and the potential of new
media to transform lives and the
paradoxical reality of the manner in
which women help produce the tools
of new media but are still distanced
from its benefits.
In 2000, in what was called the
first wave of the dotcom boom in
India, venture capital poured into
sites that promoted gaming, share
market news, matrimonial sites,
recruitment and job sites, and B2B
services. A number of websites were
launched for women users too, and a
newspaper report put the figure of
websites for women at a staggering
14,000 in the year 2000, a high figure
by any standards (Dinakar, 2000).
The sites for women largely
replicated the content and concerns
of women's magazines and the focus
area of traditional media—lifestyle,
fashion, interiors, parenting, health,
cookery, beauty, and relationship
concerns—predominated new media
too. In response to the changing
service environment of postliberalization
India, career concerns
were high. Sites like sitagita.com,
redforwomen, smartbahu.com, and
soulkurry.com, tried to re-invent
content to suit a digital medium and
vainly tried to garner eyeballs from
women users.
Soulkurry.com realized quickly
enough that the problem was not so
much with increasing eyeballs and
getting people to stay on their site
but in getting more women to use
the internet! It held a number of
offline events, from taking computers
and laptops to newly developed
departmental stores to holding
workshops and discussions with
women. Soulkurry involved wellknown
celebrities and experts in
different fields to answer questions
and provide guidance and tied up
with artists in an effort to both
educate internet users on art as well
as create an online market for artists.
Women's access to internet and their experiences of the
worldwide Web have so far been mixed.
In 2000, the personal computer
was still a novelty and internet
connections with dial up numbers,
even less prevalent. The governmentowned
Videsh Sanchar Nigam Ltd
(VSNL), which had begun five years
earlier, had only around five million
subscribers by 2000. Other Internet
Services Providers (ISPs) entered the
market and Tata Teleservices Ltd
acquired VSNL. In the big metros in
urban India, the dotcoms held great
promise but business
plans were poorly
conceived and
connectivity was
dependent on servers
hosted through VSNL.
With the already
negligible internet
penetration, the
dotcom burst in barely
a couple of years, was
inevitable. Several of
the sites started for
women and women's
issues, folded up
without a trace.
By the second wave
of the dotcom
revolution in 2006,
much had changed.
Private players had
entered the market;
e-commerce began to take off with
travel sites doing mass ticketing.
Google, which began in 1996 as a
small search engine, accessed
billions of websites. It launched its
Gmail service in 2004, acquired
YouTube in 2006, and became the
premier search engine on the
internet. Facebook, which began in
2004, soon displaced other social
networking sites like Orkut and
Myspace, allowing people to share
their lives and newsfeeds, discuss
issues and happenings, and
announce personal and professional
details to wider society. If Google
allowed people to seek out the larger
world online, Facebook achieved the
reverse: as people sought to connect
with the inner lives and concerns of
individuals and groups.
In India, there were an estimated 300 million claimed internet users by
the end of 2014, a hike of 32 percent
from the previous year. Active
internet users were 213 million as of
October 2014, and were expected to
reach 269 million by June 2015. Not
unexpectedly, the majority of active
internet users are in urban India, but
rural India's active Internet users
were 61 million by October 2014, a
33 percent increase from October
2013 (Shah, Jain, & Bajpai, 2014).
But what did this explosion mean
for half the population? How many
women who were users of the
internet, owned and operated mobile
phones and accessed the internet on
their mobiles? Definitive figures are
hard to come by but, in 2013, a
Google India survey put the figure of
women online at 60 million, 24
million of whom accessed the
internet daily. The IAMAI report for
2014 put the number of active
women internet users at 10 percent
of the total, at 20.77 million in 2014.
…
There are several efforts
underway to close India's digital
gender gap from governmental and
non-governmental organizations and
corporate bodies, often working in
partnership. …
On their part, internet companies keen on getting more people online,
have launched a number of
initiatives, from providing access to
services and developing apps that
will work in adverse conditions to
making the internet more affordable.
Facebook, along with six mobile and
wireless technology companies,
started an organization, Internet.org,
to work together to "to bring the
Internet to the two thirds of the
world's population that doesn't have
it" (Internet.org by
Facebook, 2013). A
Google India
initiative entitled
'Helping women get
online', believes that
better access to
information about
health and finance
will help lower
maternal and infant
mortality rates
thereby leading to a
rise in GDP (The
Hindu, 2013). …
In February 2015,
Facebook tied up
with the telecom,
R e l i a n c e
Communications,
in India and signed
up 38 websites to
provide access to these sites and to
Facebook to Reliance subscribers.
The idea was that Facebook, with the
telecom operator, would offer a
limited, stripped down internet to
subscribers along with their mobile
service plan.
The basket of sites offered news,
travel, employment, cricket,
health and even astrology! Only three
of the 38 sites available were
specifically targeted at women
(BabyCentre and MAMA on
pregnancy and child care, the Nike
Foundation sponsored NGO, Girl
Effect, targeted at adolescent girls
and UN Women's platform, iLearn,
for women entrepreneurs). The first
is listed under the health category
while the latter two are listed under
the category of women
empowerment. (WFS)