Proposer's Name: Ms. Bruna Santos
Proposer's Organization: GenderYouth/Youth Observatory
Co-Proposer's Name: Ms. Louise Marie Hurel
Co-Proposer's Organization: Gender Youth/Youth Observatory
Co-Organizers:
Ms Angelica, CONTRERAS, Civil Society, Youth Observatory
Ms Evelyn, NAMARA, Civil Society, Africa Civil Society on Information Society (ACSIS)
Session Format: Break-out Group Discussions - 90 Min
Proposer:
Country: Brazil
Stakeholder Group: Civil Society
Co-Proposer:
Country: Brazil
Stakeholder Group: Civil Society
Speaker: Treiber Jackie
Speaker: Jennifer Chung
Speaker: Louise Marie Hurel
Speaker: Barbara Wanner
Speaker: Heshadharani Poornima
Content of the Session:
The Internet is today a community of over 3 billion users. For the Internet to enable growth, women and men should have equal opportunities. Even though this topic has been more than discussed by all stakeholders, women and girls are still facing challenges either to access Internet, to be part of the technical community and barriers when they already have internet access.
This workshop will consist on a Narrative-based approach to promote a discussion between generations of female internet users. By telling stories and sharing experiences, the idea is to solve questions such as 'How women access the Internet?' or 'What is the content that women create on the Internet?' in order to provide meaningful insights on the way we see/perceive the relationship between women and tech.
The idea is to build an empathetic environment to promote a collective comprehension on different realities and points of view that women from different regions in the world have. There are different ways of communicating challenges among women. Reaching out to fellow women in the field is a way of exchanging views and harnessing a trust-based collaborative relationship between generations, regions and stakeholder groups. (There are different ways of communicating with women, so being able to reach out to female fellows in the field can hopefully achieve some sort of mentorship through the exchange between generations, with women from different places, cultures and stakeholder groups).
From the more intimate and informal conversation environment that the groups would provide us, we would like to share stories and hear from the audience the different forms of approaches to the Internet they had and how they feel with that. In addition, as young women we would like to hear from the groundbreaking female leaders who are already working on the ICT field and learn from their experiences. And from this conversation we would able to verify whether our barriers are the same and the better ways of defying these challenges.
As for the format of the workshop, and given the fact that we want to bridge not only generations but also the relationship between onsite/remote audience and speakers, the general audience will be separated into groups according to the number of proposed speakers. Each speaker will be assigned to a group and will be responsible to lead the conversation/debate following this scheme.
1. Narratives of the Leaders
2. Narratives of the Youth
3. Barriers encountered by women on the ICT field.
4. Questions:
(a) What could be done in order to bridge the generations and to engage the ones that are still to come?
(b) What are the main barriers encountered by women on the ICT field? and what should be done to empower and engage young women regarding the Use of ICTs ?
(c) How do women engage with and in with the Internet in order to provide meaningful insights on the way we see/perceive the relationship between women and tech?
(d) How can we create a safer Internet for women? How can we reassure the importance of freedom of expression online?
(e) Why the gender digital divide is still so pronounced even though all stakeholders know that it exists?
(f) Bearing in mind the Sustainable Development Goal (SDGs) no 5:, “Achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls", is it possible to achieve this goal by 2033 knowing that we just do not need to bridge the divide, but we also need to get greater numbers of women online?
Since we strongly believe on this work as an ongoing project for (a) empowering Young female leaders and (b) engaging the different leaders, we would like to come up with solutions regarding ways of enhancing approaches, how women can be inserted in the tech field, what could be done to improve our profits in this relation with the Internet. Therefore, the main outcome of the session would be a decalogue of rights for women on Internet.
Relevance of the Session:
This workshop will:
Promote the guidance for the younger generations by navigating through the experiences of different leaders, whether they are new ones or the rock star pioneers that first explored the Internet governance land.
Enable a safe and empathetic environment for women to discuss their diverse views and narratives with the internet.
Reassure the importance of the freedom of expression by encouraging women to speak their voices and find their paths.
Allow participants to learn from women who already have a trajectory of life and work on how to deal with all kinds of barriers, in order to reduce inequality and build strategies as a person and as a group.
Help women realize how they can shape their digital future with testimonies and experiences from other female leaders on the ICT field. It should be noted that the break out group format emphasizes that, even though we might refer to them as leaders, the session is a collective effort of humanizing trajectories, voicing challenges and sharing pathways through diverse and multi stakeholder approaches.
Also, Gender Youth is a collective that has emerged from the Youth Observatory participation in the BPF gender and Access as some of us were engaged in the best practice forum as independent researchers and/or participants.
Young Latin American women declaration: Enabling Access to Empower Young Women and Build a Feminist Internet Governance - we took on a narrative approach to write out input document for the BPF Gender & Access and agreed that having the same strategy for reaching out to more women through our experiences would be a liberating thing to do.
This session seeks to give continuity to the work set forth by the Young Latin American Women Declaration and thus engage with different visions and experiences -- both in terms of sectors and regions -- of the relationship between gender, youth and technology.
Tag 1: Gender Issues
Tag 2: Freedom of Expression Online
Tag 3: Youth Engagement
Interventions:
- Barbara Wanner, USCIB, What could be done in order to bridge the generations and to engage the ones that are still to come?
- Jennifer Chung, DotAsia, What are the main barriers encountered by women on the ICT field? and what should be done to empower and engage young women regarding the Use of ICTs ?
- Jackie Treiber, IcannWiki, How do women engage with and in with the Internet in order to provide meaningful insights on the way we see/perceive the relationship between women and tech?
- Louise Marie Hurel, Gender Youth, Why the gender digital divide is still so pronounced even though all stakeholders know that it exists?
- Heshadharani Poornima, 25 under 25 awardee, How can we create a safer Internet for women? How can we reassure the importance of freedom of expression online?
Question to the audience: Bearing in mind the Sustainable Development Goal (SDGs) no 5:, “Achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls", is it possible to achieve this goal by 2033 knowing that we just do not need to bridge the divide, but we also need to get greater numbers of women online?
We think it is of utter importance to give women the opportunity to tell their stories, experiences and cases of success in the walk towards a violence-free, accessible and egalitarian Internet in order to provide the new generations with narratives regarding the work that has been carried out up until today and the barriers encountered by many of the actresses working on the subject.
Having said that, the present workshop proposal includes representatives of different stakeholder groups. It is also important to note that when selecting our prospective speakers we took into consideration the generation, age and geographical diversity, the importance of giving the floor to new voices to be heard and also how we could explore the relationship between gender and youth through the proposal. Given the session is focused on Gender Issues, we thought it would be better to have an all women panel with diversity between them.
Onsite Moderator: Bruna Martins dos Santos
Online Moderator: Angelica Contreras
Rapporteur: Sara Fratti
Online Participation:
Prior to the IGF a survey will be shared in order to outreach women online and to gather ideas and narratives on their online journeys and perceptions of the Internet. Some of the narratives collected will serve as a basic literature for the workshop.
Also, we plan on collecting comments and questions from prospective attendees which may enrich the debate through the hashtags #genderyouthIGF2017 #GYnarratives, before and during the workshop consisting on a
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