Making Innovation and Technology Work for Women

"From mobile banking ventures that facilitate women's entrepreneurship to e-learning platforms that take classrooms to individuals, social innovations have the potential to serve as a powerful tool to break trends and increase the awareness, access and availability of opportunities for marginalized groups."

This background paper from the United Nations Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women (UN Women) highlights the key barriers that contribute towards creating and sustaining the gender gap in innovation and technology. The paper also outlines the concrete action that UN Women and its partners are taking to address them.

UN Women explains that innovation, technology, and entrepreneurship are engines for advancing gender equality and women's empowerment by increasing women's access to education and socio-economic opportunities. In turn, empowered women have the potential to benefit these sectors by providing needed skills and talent, as well as new markets. For instance, according to GSMA (2015), closing the gender gap in mobile phone ownership and usage could unlock an estimated US$170 billion in market opportunities for the mobile industry by 2020. However, this potential is constrained by a number of barriers:

• The limited market awareness and investment in innovations that meet the needs of women - UN Women points to a research bias, especially in the medical and engineering design fields, where men are taken as the norm, that leads to a lack of understanding of the unique needs of women. Other issues include a lack of gender-disaggregated data, which can mask gender differences and make it difficult to conduct gender differentiated market research and gender impact analysis. Another reason for the under-appreciation of the size of the market for gender-responsive innovations is constrained demand. That is, there is a digital gender gap resulting from: the high costs of devices and data plans; limited digital literacy and confidence; discriminatory social norms and harassment concerns; and the lack of relevant content, applications, and services. Finally, women entrepreneurs often lack affordable finance.
• The gender-blind approach to innovation - There is a lack of dedicated methodologies and tools to include gender throughout the innovation cycle, as well as limited sharing of knowledge and practices about opportunities and challenges towards a more gender-responsive innovation approach.
• The under-representation of women as innovators and entrepreneurs - UN Women stresses that, since women best understand the challenges they face in their daily lives and the barriers they experience with regard to gender equality, they are in the best position to define innovative solutions. However, women are under-represented in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) and information and communication technology (ICT)-related fields due to: gender-science stereotypes; biases in recruiting, promoting, and evaluation processes; lack of access to flexible schedules and work-life policies; and lack of role models for female innovators and entrepreneurs, which makes it more difficult for women to access informal peer networks for advice, contacts, and support and to navigate "unwritten" company rules and norms.
• The perceived high-risk, low-reward profile of investing in innovations for women and girls - notably from marginalised groups - These women, especially if living in humanitarian contexts, face lack of access to education and skills training, as well as information, markets, and finance; they are also subject to violence that constitutes widespread human rights violations.

In order to address these barriers in an integrated manner and build coalitions for change, UN Women has prioritised innovation technology as one of the "drivers of change" within its 2018-2021 Strategic Plan and established an Innovation Unit. Through a partnership approach and as articulated within its Innovation Strategy, UN Women's Innovation Unit focuses on:

1. Developing the market for innovations that advance gender equality and women's empowerment - examples include:
   • UN Women has created a Global Innovation Coalition for Change (GICC), which held its first meeting in September 2017. As part of the GICC's market awareness role, UN Women hosted its first annual Global Innovation, Technology and Entrepreneurship Industry Forum 2017 on the same day so that chief executive officers (CEOs), social entrepreneurs, innovators, and thought leaders could come together to share how innovation and technology can be used to advance gender equality and women's economic empowerment around the world.
   • UN Women has partnered with the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) and GSMA as part of the Access Coalition within the EQUALS partnership - a global movement that aims to close the gender digital divide so that women and girls are equal participants in the digital technology revolution.
   • UN Women and Global Pulse have drafted a first report on Gender Equality and Big Data: Making Gender Data Visible. Based on this report, several concept notes have been developed to focus on specific areas where big data can be used to improve our understanding of issues related to gender equality.
   • UN Women is developing an accelerator venture fund to provide access to finance to women enterprises to invest in scalable innovations that accelerate gender equality.
2. Promoting a gender-responsive approach to the innovation cycle - For the private sector, UN Women is building on the Women's Empowerment Principles (WEPs), a 7-step guide developed by UN Women in collaboration with the UN Global Compact to enable business to empower women in the workplace, marketplace, and community. UN Women's Gender Microsite on the United States Agency for International Development (USAID)'s Global Innovation Exchange Platform connects over 100 organisations from across government, business, academia, and civil society and provides them with a global forum to collaborate, share and showcase gender responsive best practices, case studies, innovations, and methodologies.
3. Promoting innovations created by women, for women - UN Women in partnership with other UN agencies promotes girls in STEM and increases their access to 21st century skills, including coding. UN Women is also partnering with UNOPS (United Nations Office for Project Services) Global Innovation Centers to promote women entrepreneurs and innovators by addressing the barriers they face. Through UN Women's Empowerwomen.org platform, UN Women has built a network of external champions to identify innovative solutions for gender equality. In an effort to challenge gender norms, leverage the power of role models, and close the gender knowledge gap, UN Women initiated the #HerStory campaign, which showcases the stories of women leaders. And UN Women's HeForShe IMPACT 10x10x10 initiative works with 10 Heads of State, 10 CEOs of major corporations, and 10 university presidents on commitments such as expanding mobile phone access to underserved women, providing scholarships to women in STEM fields, and teaching girls how to code computer software and apps.
4. De-risking high impact innovations that benefit marginalised women - UN Women adopts a 3-stage innovation cycle: (i) co-identifying potential high-impact innovations to achieve gender equality and women's empowerment; (ii) testing, prototyping, and piloting, supported by rigorous monitoring and evaluation (M&E) systems; and (iii) scaling up innovations to increase impact in the lives of women and girls. Examples include:
   • The Virtual Skills School is UN Women's e-learning portal to support different programmes, including closing the gender gap in climate-smart agriculture, women's entrepreneurship, and education and vocational learning for women in fragile situations.
   • In Rwanda, UN Women, in partnership with the Government and the World Food Programme (WFP), is piloting the Buy From Women Enterprise Platform - a data-driven enterprise platform that connects small holder farmers to the agricultural supply chain and provides them with information on weather, market prices, and incoming opportunities via text messages.
   • UN Women has partnered with Innovation Norway to assess the potential of leveraging blockchain technology to address day-to-day challenges faced by women in crisis-affected contexts. UN Women led a hackathon at the Katapult Future Fest in Oslo, where hackers developed solutions for recording identification data and enabling secure money transfer for women entrepreneurs in humanitarian contexts.
   • UN Women invites students from 26 universities and 51 technical and vocational education and training centres to participate in "Ideathons", where students design technology-driven solutions that can effectively address the problem of sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV).

UN Women concludes that "[t]ransformative results will require private and public sector partners to come together to address these barriers in an integrated manner."