“Our students are not allowed to use phones at home, so this program might be challenging to take up”, the Principal of an all-girls school told me, when I approached the school for a tech-based career education program.
The Gender Divide
The COVID-19 pandemic transformed our world into a digital matrix. Milk subscriptions to project launches were done through devices and education was one of the sectors which underwent a major transformation. This also compelled us to look into the digital divide in our country.
According to Oxfam’s India Inequality Report 2022 on Digital Divide, only 9 percent of students had access to a computer with internet and 25 percent students had access to some device with internet. This means, 75 percent of the students were not able to access digital education when that was the only option during the pandemic.
This is just the tip of the iceberg. What lies beneath or why this is so is revealed by the Principal’s statement of prohibiting mobile usage for girls.
The Oxfam report also says that just 31 percent women owned mobile phones by the end of 2021 as compared to 61 percent of men. This likely applies to girls in schools as well. The reasons stated by the Principal on further probing about the restriction was the issue of safety and misuse of mobiles. It was evident that girl students chatting with their own classmates was also considered as misuse. The result of these perceptions was the mobile phone restriction for girls.
Throughout my experience as a teaching fellow in a low-income private school and currently, as a career education project lead, I have come across many such instances. Not very surprisingly, boys do not have similar restrictions. In fact, many parents are ready to let boys own an exclusive mobile phone, whereas girls need to ask permission and book a time slot to use their parents mobile only for scheduled online classes.
My first year of teaching fellowship was completely online, and I have come across cases where there is only one mobile phone available per household and if the timings of the online classes between two siblings clash, the boy’s education is always given precedence. And yet, in many of these cases, absenteeism from these classes was also high among boys.
Another instance of clear discrimination that I witnessed was when my school launched an after-school program with choices to self-learn science, coding and art, a girl child lost the opportunity to join the Science stream of the program because her father does not allow her to use phones at home. As a class teacher, I had to convince her mother and take her help in ensuring access to the phone for the child, which was also possible only in secrecy while her father was out of home.
There is no denying that the pandemic culture gave rise to a lot of tech-based opportunities for students. The career education project that I currently lead is mostly dependent on a web portal called “mykensho” which offers evidence-based psychological tests for users (students in higher secondary classes) to understand their personality, multiple intelligence, interests, career preferences etc and lets them explore the growth industries and the high-demand job opportunities in each industry.
A student who is denied access to a phone will not be able to benefit from the program. The education departments of various state governments are also bringing up exclusive programs to educate students on career choices and mentor them through experts in different fields.
Some of the noteworthy programs are Delhi’s “Desh ki Mentor” and Tamil Nadu’s “Naan Mudhalvan”. Both these programs involve the usage of a digital device to connect with the mentors on a regular basis to build awareness on their career choices and the industries they choose. Digital literacy and access has become a norm for holistic development of a child. But, the mere accident of being born as the other gender is still impacting and influencing the access to life changing opportunities for half the population.
The changing times also require a change in the definition and inclusion of basic rights. Digital literacy and access should be considered a basic right for students in order to help them survive in this competitive world and access the opportunities that are widespread and rising.
For many of the programmes I have talked about above, as well as many more tech-based learning opportunities require only an hour per day at the maximum to reap the benefits. It is unfortunate that girls have to fight, lie, operate in secrecy, constantly justify themselves for access to technology.
This also takes me back to my personal experience when I was doing my graduate studies. Girls in the college hostel were not allowed to use smartphones and the reason was again the cliche “safety”. On the other hand, as expected, these rules were not applicable to boys in the college hostel. Though these scenarios seem to extend beyond the circle of education, it is a passive-aggressive attack on all the opportunities a girl could access and simply on her basic human rights.
Hence, though the digital divide affects all the students irrespective of their gender in accessing educational opportunities, it clearly has more impact on girls with far reaching consequences, as compared to boys.
Featured image is for representational purposes only.