Affirming gender equality in policy and practice

Given the theme for this International Women’s Day, March 8, 2023, viz. DigitALL: Innovation and technology for gender equality, one wonders whether in the face of many persisting structural and systemic barriers compounded by the pandemic that thwart women’s empowerment and the progress toward gender equality, all the efforts that has been made to strengthen the legal framework on the rights of diverse genders and the many gender intentional policies and programs, including leveraging technology for empowerment, are going to make a difference at all. Therefore, the question that arises in the face of the widening gender gap, as reflected in the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Index, 2022, is, can the winds of change through innovation powered by technology help gender mainstreaming and moving towards greater parity? While these rising figures more than anything else indicate the determination of women, girls and persons of diverse genders to speak up and with the support of civil society organizations and the law enforcement system coupled with the information they get from the internet are leveraging helplines, counselling and one stop crisis centres to secure justice, it is also clear that a lot of the incremental gains made pre-Covid in areas like livelihood development, girls’ education and healthcare are under threat and in some cases being undone. In fact, what we are witnessing today in Iran and Afghanistan in response to a massive anti-hijab protest, in the former and to legitimise women’s subordination and their secondary status in the latter in defiance of all international human rights conventions and instruments are signs that mere recognition of gender equality as the cornerstone of an inclusive governance and society is not enough.