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| Deborah Gibbins, Mary Kay’s Chief Operating Officer (Credit: Mary Kay Inc.) |
NEW YORK & GENEVA, March 21 (Bernama-BUSINESS WIRE) -- Recognizing the intersecting relationship between innovation, technology, the digital space and gender inequality, the Women’s Entrepreneurship Accelerator (WEA) brought together senior representatives of its founding partners to mark its three-year anniversary with a timely discussion ahead of CSW67 on how to move the needle to create a more gender-inclusive innovation eco-system and to address the digital gender gap.
This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20230317005336/en/
For the first time since its inception, CSW67 holistically examined the theme of innovation and technology from a gender perspective, presenting a unique opportunity to explore the gendered impacts of innovation and technology with recommendations that will set a course for a more inclusive and equitable digital economy.
With a mission to address the barriers faced by women entrepreneurs to advance the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), WEA is working to create an enabling digital innovation eco-system for women entrepreneurs to ensure countries reap the benefits of the digital transformation underway to achieve a more inclusive and sustainable world.
Hosted by the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) in Geneva, and convening WEA’s five other UN partners, the WEA anniversary event highlighted the need to invest in women entrepreneurs through digital to scale their businesses. The event underscored how the digital revolution offers tremendous opportunities to advance women’s economic status by opening up access to knowledge and international markets, and by enabling women to engage with a broader network. The event also served to highlight the risks posed by the digital transformation underway in perpetuating existing patterns of gender inequality. Key take-aways from the event included:
· Existing innovation and start-up eco-systems greatly lack gender diversity and are characterized by an uneven distribution of opportunity and financial resources.
· Women entrepreneurs are consistently faced with a lack of capital and investment to scale their businesses,¹ limited access to connectivity and to information and communication technologies (ICTs), as well as to opportunities to learn the critical skills necessary to compete in the digital economy.²
· Digital technologies, platforms and tools can also reinforce harmful gender stereotypes and discriminate against women and girls, unless they are designed to be safe, inclusive and accessible from the outset. For example, gender biases found in data sets and coded in AI algorithm products may lead to systems and services that replicate patterns of discrimination.
· Women and girls, and especially those who are at greater risk for multiple and intersecting forms of discrimination, are also the primary targets of online violence and abuse, which push them out of public participation, conversations and digital spaces more broadly. These are just some of the pressing challenges that call for gender-inclusive solutions in the digital age.
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