Technology and Women's Empowerment

The near-ubiquitous spread of ICT offers unprecedented opportunities for social and economic agents, reshapes social and economic structures and drives the emergence of socioeconomic networks. This book contributes to the growing body of literature and present state of knowledge, offering the reader broad evidence on how new information and communication technologies impact women’s economic and social empowerment and hence have an impact on overall welfare creation. More specifically, it concentrates on demonstrating how ICT may become "empowering technologies" through their implementation. The book is designed to provide deep insight into the theoretical and empirical evidence on ICT as a significant driver of women`s social and economic development. Special focus is given to examining the following broad topics: channels of ICT impact on women's development; the role of ICT in enhancing women's active participation in formal labor markets; examples of how ICT encourages education, skills development, institutions development et alia, and thus contributes to women’s social and economic empowerment, as well as case-based evidence on ICT's role in fostering women’s equality. The primary audience for the book will be scholars and academic professionals from a wide variety of disciplines but mainly those who are concerned with addressing the issues of economic development and growth, social development, the role of technology progress in the context of broadly defined socioeconomic progress. Chapters 1 and 3 of this book are freely available as downloadable Open Access PDFs at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.   

Digital technologiesand women empowerment – casting the bridges 2. Mobile phone technologies as an opportunity for women’s financial inclusion: What does the evidence say? 3. Women empowering themselves to fit into ICT 4. The role of social technologies in women’s empowerment perception: aninternational comparison 5. A multidimensional analysis of the digital gender gap in European Union Member States6. ICT usage at work as a way to reduce the gender earnings gap among European entrepreneurs 7.Self-employment of women: an opportunity or the last resort?8. ICT and women's careers: Using grassrootes ICT to expand women’s participation in nontraditional careers 9. Gender and support: Polish women at the beginning of their professional career in IT. 10. ICT for women’s poverty alleviation: What does the theory and the practice tell us? 11. "When people come to me for suggestions, I feel like an expert": Empowering women throughsmartphones in rural Bangladesh 12. Female unemployment in an emerging economy: A study of online social support as a coping strategy 13. ICT and women's economic empowerment: A cross-country analysis through investigating the impact of ICT on women financial inclusion

Ewa Lechman is Professor of Economics at the Faculty of Management and Economics at Gdansk University of Technology, Poland.