Moderate progress in gender parity and inclusion at the IGF between 2012-2013

The Internet Governance Forum (IGF) Gender Report Card is an initiative to measure the level of progress on the inclusion of gender equality and the promotion women’s empowerment in this important internet governance policy dialogue process, and it was developed in recognition of the commitment as outlined under Article 12 of the WSIS Declaration of Principles, which states:

“We affirm that development of ICTs provides enormous opportunities for women, who should be an integral part of, and key actors, in the Information Society. We are committed to ensuring that the Information Society enables women’s empowerment and their full participation on the basis on equality in all spheres of society and in all decision-making processes. To this end, we should mainstream a gender equality perspective and use ICTs as a tool to that end.”

The gender gender report card's purpose is to monitor and assess the level of gender parity and inclusion at its workshop sessions. These results are important since they influence decisions about funding, proposal acceptances, and gender mainstreaming mechanisms made in later years.

For the 2014 IGF in Turkey, APC is also monitoring the sessions using the gender report card, so please complete it on the printed copies that will be available on-site, or complete it online here after every workshop you attend to help us gather this important data. Here are the links to the 2012 report and the 2013 report.

Some 2012 and 2013 highlights on gender at the IGF

APC summarised the contents of the Gender Report Card sections of the workshop reports from the Internet Governance Forum of 2012 in Azerbaijan, and the 2013 IGF in Indonesia.

Women as panelists

In 2013, for each session the report asked about the number of women and men panellists. For the sessions for which the information was provided, there was only one session for which there were no men panellists, as against 24 for which there were no women panellists. At the other end of the scale, there were no sessions with seven or more women panellists, but five sessions with seven or more men panellists.

Overall, 104 women panellists compared to 146 men panellists were reported, meaning that there were nearly three men panellists for every two women panellists.

Gender as a topic

Of the 71 sessions for which ratings were given for 2012, gender was rated as the main theme for only 1 session (1% of the total, as against 6% for 2013), and was seen as not relevant or not related for 50 sessions (70% of the total, as against 49% for 2013).

Women as moderators

The table below gives information about the moderators for those sessions for which this information was given.

Women attending sessions

In both years more or less equal numbers of women and men attended the majority of the sessions

. However, in 2012, among the 79 sessions for which this question was answered, 16% had women in the majority, 14% had men in the majority (against only 4% in this category in 2013) and 2% had no women attending.

In addition to asking about the actual number of women and men participants, the report card asked whether women constituted the majority, about half, a minority, or none of the participants. None of the report cards recorded that there were no women participants. The fact that so many sessions were recorded as having gender-balanced participation, whereas the previous table shows the majority as having more men suggests that the term “equal” was understood in a broad way.

Women’s proportion of participants in 2012 and 2013

As pointed in this article, many things have still to be done in order to achieve a really significant progress regarding the inclusion of gender equality and the promotion women’s empowerment in this important internet governance policy dialogue process that the IGF represents. And collecting the information is a first crucial step to achieve this. Please make your contribution by completing the gender report card at this IGF in Turkey by using the printed copies that will be available on-site, or completing it online here after every workshop you attend to.

You can take a look at the presentation made for the meeting at the 2014 IGF on the 2013 Gender report card results from 2013 here.