Gabriela Marín
Universidad de Costa Rica. Costa Rica
email: gabriela.marin@ucr.ac.cr
Universidad de Costa Rica. Costa Rica
Latin America and the Caribbean is a middle-income region, with the majority of its 42 countries and territories belonging to that category. However, it is a heterogeneous region, ranging from low income countries, as Haiti, to countries which have higher income and are regarded as more developed, like Chile, Mexico, Argentina and Brazil. According to SEDLAC, 34.3% of the Latin American population is in the middle class (with incomes between $10 a day and $50 a day), and 25.3% are still under the moderate poverty line of $ 4 a day.
In the last decades, the region has worked to achieve the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs): poverty has been reduced to lower levels, more girls are in school, child mortality has dropped, and diseases are being fought. However, gender issues remain. Too many women still die in childbirth, and more needs to be done to boost gender parity in employment and decision making, as well as, access to education and reproductive health services. Inequality remains a key problem. Progress in the Region has been weaker amongst women, youth, indigenous peoples, afro-descendants and rural populations.
Digital divide is rooted in the very issues that constrain Latin America’s overall economic development - income inequality, lack of infrastructure and a still-nascent technological knowledge base according to UNDP. The region, as a whole, suffers from a poor legal framework for the development of the ICT sector, heavy administrative burdens, almost in-existing government prioritization for ICT development, low Internet penetration rates, and pervasive brain drain which undermines the potential for faster growth of the economies’ ICT sectors.
An overview on gender inequality on access to technology tools, computers, Internet and education in the region is presented. Moreover, women’s low participation on the ICT sector is depicted. Cultural, professional and technological barriers imposed on women participation are analyzed, and some possible actions to reduce such gender biases are proposed. Latin American initiatives to try to promote gender digital equity and the presence of women on the ICT sector are also described.
@InProceedings{CLEI-2015:150000,
author = {Gabriela Marín},
title = {Digital Equity and Gender Issues in Latin America},
booktitle = {2015 XLI Latin American Computing Conference (CLEI), Special Edition},
pages = {78--78},
year = {2015},
editor = {Universidad Católica San Pablo},
address = {Arequipa-Peru},
month = {October},
organization = {CLEI},
publisher = {CLEI},
url = {http://clei.org/clei2015/150000},
isbn = {978-9972-825-91-0},
}