Empowering Women and Girls in Digital India
The permeation of digital technologies across all facets of social life is creating new opportunities for innovation and empowerment, but also exacerbating inequities and contributing to new types of harm and risk.
The benefits and harms of technology are also not evenly distributed. A growing body of research shows that already marginalised identities and groups are disproportionately vulnerable (Moitra et al, 2021). But it is often the voices and experiences of these groups that are excluded from dominant policy imaginaries (Whittaker, 2019).
The vocabulary and goals of technology policy in India, or globally, are also far from settled. The meaning of concepts such as data, privacy, and digital rights, and the means to secure them, continue to be energetically contested in policy and research fora. As these conversations are still emergent, it is vital that they are informed by a wide diversity of knowledge and experience.
This study seeks to bring to the fore the experiences and perspectives of girls and women as they navigate digital spaces. It also seeks to identify the knowledge, programmatic and policy gaps regarding protecting the rights of women and girls in digital spaces:
- What are the priorities and experiences of girls and women as they navigate digital spaces in India? How should concepts like data and privacy be re-tooled to reflect these realities?
- What types of interventions are grassroots organisations working in this space undertaking? What challenges do they experience?
- How might we strengthen linkages between grassroots and policy organisations, so that the lived experiences and lessons of girls and women are better reflected dominant policy imaginaries?