2013 Women's Day
A Professor of Law, Roberta Alluvial, at the University of Torino, Italy, has called for greater access for women and girls in the digital spaces for wider and greater self expression.
Alluvial msde the appeal on Monday in Ilorin while delivering a paper entitled: “Navigating the Conundrum Militating Against Women – A Comparative Perspective”.
The international conference was organised by the Department of Jurisprudence and International Law, University of Ilorin, to mark this year’s International Women’s Day.
She believed that greater access for women and girls in the digital spaces is one of the surest ways of attenuating gender inequality.
The don explained that digital literacy has proven to be an efficacious platform for women and girls to raise relevant questions from the privacy of their homes and obtain required responses in a way that positive impacts can be created.
She also said that digital literacy is now in use to connect like-minded women across the world and bridge physical distances that are, otherwise, difficult to overcome in the interest of the global community.
Alluvial explained that the magnitude of “inequalities in the digital world replicates and perpetuates” itself in the real world.
She added that it was an incontrovertible fact that one of the greatest factors hindering the realisation of the full potentials of women in the contemporary world and in comparison with men is unequalled and unsafe access to the digital world by the females.
She therefore canvassed huge qualitative and quantitative improvement in digital literacy among women and girls in order to overcome biased gender norms and stereotypes.
The expert in Law expressed fear that if not addressed, digital illiteracy among the female folks may impose negative consequences on their lives, careers, employment opportunities and participation in the market.
She explained that women dominated the first set of computer programmers after the Second World War, but that men are today the undisputable kings of computer programming in Silicon Valley.
She traced the downward trend in digital literacy among women to the mid-1980s when Personal Computers entered homes and they were given as gifts to boys while girls were left out in what she described as “traditional stereotypes”.
Alluvial therefore urged nations to emulate India, where women are deliberately encouraged by their families to embrace digital literacy.
According to her, the proportion of women in Computer Science courses in India is much higher than what is obtainable in the United States of America. (NAN)
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Tags: Roberta Alluvial
