Cogburn, Addom, and Mwangi – Gender in Global ICT Governance
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with expertise in these areas, rather the persistence of barriers that women face due to disabling
socio-cultural and managerial environments at home and at work. In July 1997 ECOSOC defined
the concept of gender mainstreaming as follows: “Mainstreaming a gender perspective is the process
of assessing the implications for women and men of any planned action, including legislation,
policies or programs, in any area and at all levels. It is a strategy for making the concerns and
experiences of women as well as of men an integral part of the design, implementation, monitoring
and evaluation of policies and programs in all political, economic and societal spheres, so that
women and men benefit equally, and inequality is not perpetuated. The ultimate goal of
mainstreaming is to achieve gender equality” (Bisnath, 2004).
Gender at WSIS 2003
While WSIS certainly marks an important milestone in the advocacy concerning gender issues
in the ICT arena, the outcomes fall short of providing specific directions and action plans for the
building of a gender-just information society. Paragraph 12 Declaration of Principles, WSIS First
Phase in Geneva states that ‘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 of 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.’
However, Jenson (2003) argues that despite active lobbying by gender advocates, the Summit paid
lip service to gender but did not recognize gender as a key political issue in the ICT arena, nor make
specific commitments to actively promote women’s equal role in the information society. Two
groups of gender advocates participated in the preparatory process for WSIS – the multistakeholder
WSIS Gender Caucus (GC, http://www.genderwsis.org), and the NGO Gender Strategies Working
Group (NGO GSWG, http://www.genderit.org). These groups were able to mobilize some support
Convention