Business Wire

GSMA Advances a Comprehensive Agenda on Digital Inclusion for Women Ahead of G20 Summit

Share

The GSMA is supporting the sixty-second meeting of the Commission on the Status of Women (CSW62) taking place at the United Nations Headquarters in New York this month1 as part of its commitment to the Sustainable Developments Goals (SDGs), particularly SDG 5 (Gender Equality). The GSMA’s role at the event reflects its status as Topic Chair of the Digital Inclusion theme within the W20 (Women 20) group2, which will advise the G20 member states on issues around gender equality and the economic empowerment of women. At CSW62, the GSMA and its partners will be convening parallel events across a range of topics in this area, bringing together companies in the mobile ecosystem, governments, UN agencies and NGOs.

“Developing forward-looking policies that promote digital inclusion for women is vital to achieving gender equality, serving to empower women in all corners of the world as well as providing an effective catalyst for economic growth,” said Mats Granryd, Director General of the GSMA. “As Topic Chair of the Digital Inclusion work stream within the W20, the GSMA is bringing the public and private sectors together to accelerate global progress in bridging the gender digital divide.”

“Ideas and public policies behind technology transform our reality,” said Susana Balbo, Chair of the W20. “Bridging the gap between men and women in the digital world, by achieving true inclusion and development in every country, will be at the heart of the W20 recommendations to the G20 – and mobile technologies offer an excellent opportunity to reverse the current inequality."

Mobile Driving Digital Inclusion For Women
As a W20 Topic Chair, the GSMA will help lead the debate in the run-up to the G20 Argentina 2018 summit taking place in Buenos Aires, 30 November - 1 December 2018. This work will involve creating forums for dialogue with international organisations and experts to help draft the W20 recommendations and influence decision-making groups in the G20 to carry out policies towards gender equality. Achieving equality via digital inclusion is one of the four strategic objectives of the W20, alongside labour inclusion, financial inclusion and rural development.

Mobile is considered a key tool in driving digital inclusion, particularly in emerging markets where mobile is empowering for women, making them feel safer and more connected and providing access to a range of life-enhancing information and services. However, there remains a considerable ‘gender gap’ in mobile ownership and use. According to the latest GSMA research3, women in low- and middle-income countries are, on average, 10 per cent less likely to own a mobile phone than men, and 26 per cent less likely to use mobile internet.

In terms of women in the workplace around the world, the percentage of women working in most industries actually decreased in 2017, with a particularly steep slide in the tech sector, according to the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Report 2017 4 . The number of women in leadership roles in the tech sector and in tech roles is also lower than in many other sectors, and the gender pay gap remains wide.

The GSMA supports efforts to accelerate digital and financial inclusion for women via its participation in W20; the EQUALS initiative; the GSMA Connected Women programme; Women4Tech; the WeCare initiative in Latin America; and the #BetterFuture campaign.

In 2016 the GSMA launched the Connected Women Commitment Initiative through which mobile operators are making formal commitments to reduce the gender gap in their mobile money and/or mobile internet customer base by 2020. To date 36 mobile operators across Africa, Asia and Latin America have made 51 commitments, so far reaching over 2.5 million women.

-ENDS-

About the GSMA
The GSMA represents the interests of mobile operators worldwide, uniting nearly 800 operators with more than 300 companies in the broader mobile ecosystem, including handset and device makers, software companies, equipment providers and internet companies, as well as organisations in adjacent industry sectors. The GSMA also produces industry-leading events such as Mobile World Congress, Mobile World Congress Shanghai, Mobile World Congress Americas and the Mobile 360 Series of conferences.

For more information, please visit the GSMA corporate website at www.gsma.com. Follow the GSMA on Twitter: @GSMA.

_________________________
1 http://www.unwomen.org/en/csw/csw62-2018
2 The W20 is one of seven independent engagement groups comprised of civil society organisations from the G20 member counties. The engagement groups convene in tandem with the G20 and ensure that the position of civil society on important issues is taken on board by the G20 leaders. For more information see http://w20argentina.com
3 https://www.gsma.com/mobilefordevelopment/programmes/connected-women/the-mobile-gender-gap-report-2018
4 https://www.weforum.org/reports/the-global-gender-gap-report-2017

To view this piece of content from cts.businesswire.com, please give your consent at the top of this page.

Contact information

For the GSMA
Beau Bass
+44 79 7662 4962
beau.bass@webershandwick.com
or
GSMA Press Office
pressoffice@gsma.com

About Business Wire

Business Wire
Business Wire
24 Martin Lane
EC4R 0DR London

+44 20 7626 1982http://www.businesswire.co.uk

(c) 2018 Business Wire, Inc., All rights reserved.

Business Wire, a Berkshire Hathaway company, is the global leader in multiplatform press release distribution.

Subscribe to releases from Business Wire

Subscribe to all the latest releases from Business Wire by registering your e-mail address below. You can unsubscribe at any time.

Latest releases from Business Wire

NetApp Empowers Customers to Securely “Talk to Their Data” in Collaboration with NVIDIA18.3.2024 23:00:00 CET | Press release

NetApp® (NASDAQ: NTAP) today announced it is collaborating with NVIDIA to advance retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) for generative AI applications. The new collaboration directly connects the just-announced NVIDIA NeMo Retriever microservices—coming to the NVIDIA AI Enterprise software platform for development and deployment of production-grade AI applications, including generative AI—to exabytes of data on NetApp’s intelligent data infrastructure. Every NetApp ONTAP® customer will now be able to seamlessly “talk to their data” to access proprietary business insights without having to compromise the security or privacy of their data. Enterprises want to leverage publicly available large language models to talk directly and securely to their corporate data with assurance that their private data will never be accessible outside the enterprise. Until now, enterprises that wanted to build internal chatbots, co-pilots, and applications that leverage corporate knowledge were faced with co

KPMG’s "Digital Gateway for Tax" Platform Raises Global Standards in Tax Functionality with Generative AI18.3.2024 18:38:00 CET | Press release

In a landmark move, KPMG has enhanced the capabilities of its Digital Gateway for Tax incorporating generative AI (genAI) as an independent component to communicate directly with data, enabling powerful insights and enhanced levels of efficiency. This pioneering Software as a Service (SaaS) is designed to provide an end-to-end solution for all members of the tax department and marks a significant milestone in tax technology, integrating generative AI for organizations embarking on their tax digital transformation journey. The KPMG Digital Gateway for Tax platform’s real strength lies in its content and transparent data enrichment capabilities. The solution empowers clients to use the Digital Gateway as their Centralized Knowledge Hub, where users can access company-specific documents through the unified genAI platform. The RAG approach (Retrieval Augmented Generation) is relied upon to effortlessly enrich models with additional content which helps ensure the information used to generat

Media invitation: World leaders must make headway for adaptation - there are no alternatives18.3.2024 18:06:00 CET | Press release

A coalition of international climate organizations will come together for an event in Copenhagen on the 20 March 2024 to deliver recommendations on integrating climate and development for climate finance to world leaders, ahead of a year of intense negotiations, starting at the Copenhagen Climate Ministerial. This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20240318208761/en/ Photo: Mathilde Utzon The year 2024 is of paramount importance for our future. We face an urgent need to handle the climate crisis, within the broader range of Sustainable Development Goals. This year’s high-level meetings leading up to COP29 will focus on climate finance, aiming to address the substantial funding gaps. To kick-start these discussions DanChurchAid, E3G, the International Institute for Environment and Development, CONCITO, NDC Partnerships, and the UN Foundation are coming together to co-host the virtual and in-person event ‘Integrating Clim

Verimatrix Releases Counterspy as a New Anti-Piracy Solution with First-Ever Defensive Capabilities18.3.2024 17:45:00 CET | Press release

Regulatory News: Verimatrix, (Euronext Paris: VMX), the leader in powering the modern connected world with people-centered security, today announced general availability of its new Verimatrix Counterspy anti-piracy solution -- the most advanced anti-piracy technology seen in the past decade. Counterspy leverages technology first developed by the company's cybersecurity team back in 2021 to offer an innovative new way to counter the rise in video piracy in an era where streaming apps are prevalent. Counterspy is a standalone product within Verimatrix's anti-piracy team, engineered to prevent video content theft, shield apps from attack, and provide ongoing piracy threat prediction, detection and response services. Counterspy goes beyond traditional methods to ensure top-tier security for media app subscribers, safeguarding content across various devices. It fills the gap in authentication created by the shift from operator-controlled set top box hardware to retail or app-based OTT clien

Centrico Spa (Gruppo Banca Sella) and Veracode Enter Deal to Help Secure the Application Development Life Cycle18.3.2024 15:42:00 CET | Press release

Centrico Spa, part of Gruppo Sella and a specialist in providing open banking systems for innovation-oriented financial institutions, has entered a collaboration with Veracode, a global leader in application security risk management. The deal will enhance the analysis, detection, and prioritization of flaws to expedite software fixes at every stage of Centrico’s application development life cycle. Modern banking and finance are exposed to a stringent and evolving landscape, not least as a result of the Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA) and an increase in frequent and sophisticated cyberattacks. According to data collected in Veracode’s State of Software Security Report, 72 percent of financial organizations contain vulnerabilities—the lowest percentage of all sectors analyzed and an improvement from the previous year. Even so, financial organizations would benefit from increased automation and secure coding techniques to help them prevent, detect, and respond to vulnerabilities

HiddenA line styled icon from Orion Icon Library.Eye