Gender And Information-And-Communication Technologies (ICTS) In Development Policy-Making – A Case Of The World Summit On The Information Society

The primary purpose of this research is to understand how gender and technology issues are reflected in the international policy documents and discourse of the World Summit on the Information Society, an international event organized under the auspices of the United Nations and the International Telecommunications Union. Two propositions informed the reading of the literature and formed the basis of this research. One, gender analysis of development policies allows for placing gender within its proper context of development and in the ICT policy formulation process utilized at the WSIS; and two, the placement of technology in development theory provides an understanding of the effective use of information-and-communication-technologies (ICTs) in development. Using the Critical Theory approach, I hoped to answer the following central question: What were the gender-and-technology issues reflected in this WSIS event, which primarily concentrated on information and communication technologies (ICTs)? For this research, I used the case study method to study this World Summit on the Information Society event. Using gender analysis of the documents and other materials, I hoped to explore the gender and technology dimensions in this Information and Communications Technologies (ICTs) policy-making. The research used multiple sources of information – website information, policy documents, listservs and e-mails, and the Summit working papers written by researchers to get a detailed description of the event and its setting. The data was aggregated into themes to provide the underlying interpretations of these policies