L-A• Thanks for coming to our session, in which we’ll be reporting on some research

we’ve conducted, using Open Education Research Hub data, on the potential for openness to help increase women’s empowerment in the developing world.

• Our full paper in Open Praxis gives much more detail about the findings so do check it out.

L-A• 25 September, the 193 countries of the UN General Assembly adopted the 2030

Development Agenda, comprising an intergovernmental set of 17 aspirational Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) with 169 targets.

• Women’s empowerment is the focus of Goal 5, which includes amongst its targets one of only 4 references to ICT amongst the SDG: ‘Enhance the use of enabling technology, in particular information and communications technology (ICTs), to promote the empowerment of women’ (Target 5b).

L-A• A recent report by the World Wide Web Foundation on women’s digital exclusion

defines empowerment as the exercise of choice in social, cultural, organisational, economic and political domains.

• The report gives a clear account of the potential of ICT to increase women’s capabilities (to draw on Amartya Sen’s ‘capabilities’ approach) through the acquisition of: Informational power, communicative power, and associative power.

L-AAnd access to ICT also means access to the benefits of open educational resources and practices.

L-AHowever, the reality is a story of exclusion and deprivation in many cases.A recent report by the World Wide Web foundation makes depressing reading regarding women’s digital exclusion in the developing world. For example;• Women are about 50% less likely than men to use the internet in poor urban

communities. • Across the 9 surveyed countries in Africa, Asia and South America, 37% of women

were Internet users, in comparison with 59% of men.• It is clear that privilege leads to even more privilege in that women who are

politically active offline are twice as likely to use the Internet, and access to higher education narrows the gender gap in Internet access.

L-AIn our full paper we go into detail about some of the reasons for this digital exclusion, which also prevents women in the developing world from realising the benefits of openness in education through OER and OEP. For now, I’ll just summarise…

BIntro to OERH and open dataset.Sample breakdown, especially gender in GN and GS.

B3 research questions…Photo: CCAFS CC-BY-NC-SA

BWhen asked about their interest in using OER, a comparison between responses from women in developed and developing countries reveals that the latter give more importance to the role of open resources in their professional development (68.4% vs 56%), training others at work (22.2% vs 6.7%) and improving both their non-native language skills (32.7% vs 14.6%) and study skills (57.3% vs 47.7%). All these differences were found to be statistically significant (Table 4).

BeaEngagement with OER is comparable with Global North, and greater in terms of creating OER for study or teaching.Qualitative evidence of changed attitudes towards sharing resources.

B• Women’s engagement with OER & OEP in the Global South is particularly

impressive considering the challenges they face in doing so, typically greater than women in the Global North.

• Go through challenges…• Technology problems and finding relevant resources emerge as the biggest

disparities between Global North and Global South.

BAnalysis of the OERH dataset in respect of educators’ use of OER, and the impact of this, also reveals disparities between Global North and South with the impact of OER on female teachers’ educational practices appearing considerably greater in the Global South.Go through categories…

BeaWhen comparing women and men in the global south, women still show greater impact of OER on their teaching than men, in most categories.

L-A ImplicationsOER/OEP can help achieve women’s empowerment through the development of:• Financialpower&autonomythroughlowcostprofessional development• Informationalpower (healthcare, civic participationetc)• Associationalpower throughcommunities• The levelof engagement withOER &OEP isparticularlyimpressive consideringthe

challenges faced bythewomen surveyed.BUT – our own research is limited to well-educated women already engaging online with an online survey and the real barriers are societal.

L-AOur recommendations: We do acknowledge that the biggest barriers to women’s empowerment through openness and ICTs more generally are societal, cultural, and economic. However, we’ve limited our recommendations to those achievable by the open education community.

L-AWe also recommend that OER projects prioritise the localisation of existing and new OER, including translation into mother tongue languages – a common area ofexclusion for women who’ve not had an education in English or other languages of power and can only speak their mother tongue.

L-ARelease OER in additional formats to minimise the cost barrier to engagement. (Tess-India; community radio/CoL)

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L-A• Prioritise developing communities of practice for OER creation and OEP,

including women at all stages of empowerment

• Examples – VUSSC; Karnataka OER project and Subject Teachers’ Forum developed by the Bengalaru-based NGO IT for Change.

• FINALLY, Go offline when researching ICTs and openness, and explore more diverse barriers to digital participation and engagement with openness

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LOur full paper in Open Praxis gives much more detail about the findings so do check it out.