Stirring Up the Pot?: Integrating Gender into ICT Policy, Practice, and Evaluation

Also published as: Shade, Leslie Regan (2006) “Getting Gender into the Agenda: Canadian Policy on the ‘Information Highway’”, in Susan B. Kretchmer, ed., Navigating the Network Society: The Challenges and Opportunities of the Digital Age, Thousand Oaks: CA.This working paper traces Canadian policy initiatives whose goals have been to insert a gender-based analysis into universal access policy to the Internet. Early policy formulations on what was then dubbed the ‘information highway’, by both public interest groups and the Canadian federal government, recommended that initiatives consider gender as an important category to include in universal access definitions. Although reflected in the final report of the Information Highway Advisory Council (IHAC), gender mainstreaming of Canadian Internet projects never materialized, nor did the creation of a ‘National Access Strategy’ as recommended by IHAC’s final report. Instead, emboldened by the promise of dot.com ventures, the government switched gears and pushed for a national strategy on e-commerce. Rhetoric changed to creating opportunities in a ‘knowledge-based economy’. Canada’s ‘national access strategy’ thus coalesced around Industry Canada’s Connecting Canadians agenda. This paper will first describe early work done by public interest groups to create a gender-based analysis to the information highway. Events, groups, and policy interventions in the Canadian context will be briefly outlined, with Appendix 2 providing a summary. The paper will then examine the increasing importance of gender analyses in ICT initiatives by diverse NGO groups, which has received particular attention in the follow-up to the Beijing Conference on Women in 1995 (Beijing +5), at the 47th UN Commission on the Status of Women, held in March 2003, which dealt with women and ICTs, and at the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) in Geneva (December 2003) and in Tunis (November 2005). The paper will conclude by reiterating the need for considering gender in ICT policy and provide some policy recommendations for program evaluation within the Canadian context, looking briefly as well at how community informatics has addressed gender issues.Social Science and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) - Initiative on the New Economy Public Outreach Grant; Canadian Research Alliance for Community Innovation and Networking (CRACIN)