Women’s Empowerment

Women’s Empowerment
The global context
Equality of opportunity between men and
women is a key indicator of long-term social
stability and economic prosperity. Over the
last two decades, there has been significant
progress in closing the global gender gap:
for example, more girls are attending school
than ever before and there has been a
large reduction in the number of mothers
dying in childbirth.
However, major challenges remain. UNESCO has
found that more than 60 million girls worldwide
are out of school.¹ Evidence suggests that
women are more likely to live in poverty than
men² and it is estimated that every year there
are more than 250,000 maternal deaths and
1.7 million new-born infant deaths that would
have been averted if the appropriate healthcare
services had been available.³ Many women are
economically disadvantaged compared with
men: less likely to be engaged in formal work,
paid less, less likely to set up a business and less
able to benefit from education and training as a
consequence of the burden of domestic labour.
While the gender gap is more visible in emerging
markets – particularly where reinforced by
cultural norms – there are also systemic
challenges in even the most advanced
economies. Women account for almost half of all
roles in the workplace in developed countries;
however, comparatively few progress their
careers at the same pace as their male peers.
There is a ‘leaky pipeline’ of talent in which
women and men enter the workplace as young
adults in broadly equal numbers but female
representation decreases at more senior levels.
The UN Sustainable Development Goals
recognise that gender equality is core to the
functioning of modern society. Measures
designed to enable women and girls to thrive
alongside men and boys can improve public
health, increase productivity and grow prosperity,
potentially increasing GDP in certain countries by
up to 34%. 4
Communications technology has a critical role to
play in achieving those objectives. Mobile phones
represent independence for many women and
girls. Even a basic mobile provides a woman with
the freedom to communicate, ask for help, learn,
set up and run a business and – as we explain
later in this section – achieve financial security.
For that reason, in the most patriarchal of
cultures it is not unusual for men to seek to
control or deny access to mobile phones for their
wives and daughters.
Mobile technologies also enhance a wide
range of public services and economic
activities of direct relevance to women and
girls in emerging markets, from disease control
and maternal healthcare to increased crop
yields for smallholding farmers and mobile
banking financial services for self-employed
homeworkers. Many of these applications
are life-changing for women; some of them
are also life-saving.
200 million
fewer women than men own
a mobile phone worldwide
It is estimated that more than 1.7 billion women
in low- and middle-income countries do not
own a mobile phone. If you are a woman, you
are 14% less likely to own a mobile than a man;
worldwide, that equates to approximately 200
million fewer women than men who can use
a mobile to manage their daily lives and seek
opportunities to grow and learn. Some of the
reasons for this are economic; however, many
are linked to cultural norms.
Closing the mobile gender gap would have a
significantly positive socio-economic impact for
the reasons explained above. There are also good
financial reasons for the mobile industry to focus
on this objective; it is estimated that connecting
more women (and increasing the mobile usage
of existing women customers) to reach parity
with men could enhance industry revenues by
around $170 billion from 2015 to 2020. 5 There
is therefore a very strong alignment between
a critical societal need and a global industry
commercial opportunity.
Women’s Empowerment | Vodafone Group Plc Sustainable Business Report 2015 -16 8