3 Steps to Supercharge Women’s Leadership in Pandemic Times
Connecting women globally through technology is our best bet for a healthy post-pandemic future
“When we use technology to activate the suppressed leadership of billions of women, they will encode new values, norms, and solutions that will ultimately benefit us all.” — World Pulse
By now, you’ve probably seen the memes and stories applauding the competence of women heads of state who are tackling the Coronavirus crisis. From Germany, to New Zealand, to Taiwan, countries with women at the helm are faring better than others.
This comes as no surprise to those who have followed studies into the importance of women’s leadership, at all levels of society, to protect and restore social and economic well-being in times of crisis — despite usually also being the group most impacted by crises.
Following the genocide in Rwanda, it was the country’s women who led efforts to rebuild and heal. Women now make up 60% of Rwanda’s elected officials and leaders from other nations visit to learn how to come back from disaster. The global #BlackLivesMatter movement was founded by three Black women in the United States responding to the crisis of systemic racism and state violence. Black women are playing leading roles as the movement decentralizes and spreads across the globe. Looking back to the 1918 pandemic, women stepped forward in the U.S. and joined the workforce to help lead recovery efforts, ultimately galvanizing political pressure for the right to vote and transforming society with greater rights and freedoms.
Over the past decade, a landslide of data has proved that investments in women’s intersectional leadership across all levels of society and in every country are the most effective and efficient lever to solve global challenges — from the climate crisis, to national security, ending poverty, and improving human health and wellbeing.
Our crisis response to the pandemic must leverage women’s leadership as the answer for a resilient post-pandemic future. We can’t afford to go back to the old operating systems that were already broken. We can make this crisis a turning point if we double down and supercharge women’s leadership and women-led movements with unprecedented investment and focus.
And with the world turning increasingly online, we can — and must — use the power of technology to systemically strengthen this rising leadership, from the ground up.
Instead of a Tragic Roll Back, Let’s Leap Forward
We have to move fast to boost inclusive women’s leadership. Gender experts are already sounding the alarm that the Coronavirus and its aftershocks threaten to shove women’s rights back decades.
Before the pandemic struck, the World Economic Forum warned that it would be another 100 years to reach gender equality at our current pace. But now, women everywhere have been the hardest hit by the pandemic — especially women of color, women with disabilities, women in low-income countries, and the most vulnerable in society — making a dire situation worse.
Women, who were already putting in an estimated value of $10 trillion of unpaid care work, are staggering under additional pressures and stress as 70% of the world’s health workers and the majority of family caregivers. This burden is on top of a pre-existing epidemic of gender-based violence with an estimated economic impact of $1.5 trillion USD. The pandemic is only exacerbating gender-based violence: household violence is estimated to be doubling in many countries. Australia registered a 75% increase in Google searches for help for domestic violence. The United Nations Population Fund estimates the pandemic will cause 31 million more incidents of violence and a surge of millions of more child marriages and early pregnancies, preventing countless girls from ever coming back to school.
Ultimately Coronavirus can lead us to a much bigger cure: healing the sickness of an unequal society.
The pandemic is a delicate, paradoxical moment of potential or disaster — and we have the power to choose which path we take. Ultimately, the Coronavirus can lead us to a much bigger cure: healing the sickness of an unequal society.
Women Are Using the Web to Weave a New World
If there’s one tool that if properly used and more readily available, gives us the potential to catapult women’s rights forward, it’s technology.
Pandemic lockdowns are pushing the world online, faster. The reality is virtual spaces are now the main space, rather than a supporting one, where women gather to collaborate for social change. With continued waves of viral outbreaks predicted ahead of us, this will likely continue to be true for a long time, permanently altering civilization.
The reality is virtual spaces are now the main space, rather than a supporting one, where women can gather to collaborate for social change.
We’re just beginning to seize the power of the internet and make it our own. So far women’s movements have used technology to foment some of the biggest mass movements of modern times, from the Women’s March, #MeToo, #BlackLivesMatter in the US to #NiUnaMenos(#NotOneMore) across Latin America, #KuToo in Japan, #BringBackOurGirls and #Sex4Grades in Nigeria, and recently #UnDíaSinNosotras (#ADayWithoutUs), protesting femicide in Mexico, just to name a few.
While impactful, most of these hashtag movements tend to form and then dissipate. Often volunteer-powered on shoestring budgets, they bring flash pressure points, raise awareness, and have led to some incremental changes in power structures, culture, and policy.
I shiver when I imagine how earthshaking these online movements and leaders could be with sustained investment and strategically linked digital infrastructure.
Glimpsing a Connected, Post-Pandemic World
Over the past decade, I‘ve seen first-hand the potential of technology to activate ordinary women to create change. As the founder of World Pulse, a safe social network connecting tens of thousands of women from across 190 countries, I have learned that it is possible to consciously design sustainable online spaces that enable women to speak out, join together, and become leaders in their communities. Today the members of our network report going on to impact 17.4 million lives via their new movements, businesses, and social norm and policy change. We know that the right online environment can nurture women’s ability to make tangible, offline change.
As the shadow of pandemic lockdowns spread across the globe, every day on my World Pulse feed, I witness a surge of women community leaders from Pakistan to Canada to Zimbabwe who are turning online with urgency to protect and provide for their communities. They are showing us the healthy future women can create, on a mass scale, with the right tools.
There’s Kirthi Jayakumar in Chennai, India, who with an online support network gained the confidence to build her own app called Saahaas to provide gender-based violence resources to women in 120 countries cataloging over 40,000 resources. When lockdowns began, she jumped into action to convert her app to crowdsource and disseminate COVID-appropriate support resources to thousands trapped in their homes. She also became a human switchboard, fielding inbound calls from women whose lives were at risk and connecting them to government and human rights services. In the South Pacific nation of Vanuatu, grassroots-led Women’s Weather Watch worked with the ministry of health to send inclusive health and safety text messages across five islands in local languages and accessible to those with disabilities, reaching over 77,000 people. A Pacific Feminist instrumental in the effort, Sharon Bhagwan Rolls says, “social media and digital platforms must be used to convey trustworthy information and stories of courage and hope.”
Across 25 countries, World Pulse digital ambassadors who had been previously training 40,000 women and girls in person with digital skills are now meeting weekly on Zoom calls they call “Thriving Thursdays” to share knowledge to support each other as they help their communities adapt to the new challenges.
“Our hands are on the keyboard, but our feet are on the ground in our communities,” they say. They want us to know that they are real people lifting up others around them — not just eyeballs, clicks, and likes. They’re using the web as an instrument to source the best information, connections, and resources to power their local efforts.
Despite few resources or little political power, I see women using technology to move quickly together, forging a vast new immune system to protect the most at risk and build resilient communication modes to insulate against future shocks.
Across the globe, I see women community leaders rising to the moment with technology in hand — creating rapid-response lifelines and connecting to exchange information across geographic distances: sharing patterns for sewing protective masks, making soap, building community gardens, joining digital protests, exchanging health information, advising on homeschooling, providing virtual life-saving services for those experiencing domestic violence, mental health crises, and more.
While it may seem that most women are just “cocooning at home” — many who have access to digital technologies are actually creating a vast web of a global, mutual-aid, care economy. They are tapping into an online sisterhood -to keep their finger on the pulse of the latest health information, raise their voices, exchange their own innovative solutions, and to find solidarity and inspiration in the face of exhaustion and despair.
Despite few resources and little political power, what I see is women using technology to move quickly together, forging a vast new immune system to protect the most at risk and build resilient communication modes to insulate against future shocks.
A Dawning Digital Opportunity
Locally responsive, women-led, information and resource distribution highways are now emerging online. We can strengthen these to not only respond better in the face of crisis, but become the foundation for an inclusive and resilient pathway for humanity’s future.
Today, nearly half of the world’s women have access to technology as a transformational tool. With the right coordinated efforts, those who are connected can become agents of change to bring the rest of the world online for good. If we start now connecting online pathways that lift up women’s leadership — this infrastructure will help women’s leadership to grow more rapidly over time for strong rapid response networks and even prevention mechanisms to avert a worse crisis in the future.
However, we have work to do to overcome existing technological barriers. When it comes to technology, the Coronavirus is ripping off the mask of women’s inequality.
The gendered digital divide is real. Nearly half of women on the planet are still offline, blocked by access, cost, social norms, and lack of digital skills and confidence. Their ability to participate in shaping their future and their communities is limited in the knowledge economy. In fact, digital skills are soon to be a requirement, not a luxury for the workforce — 90% of jobs are estimated to need digital skills in the next 10 years. This limitation is even more urgent, accelerated by predicted business reforms in the wake of the pandemic.
At a time when women globally already have 23% less access to the internet, 30–50% less in some countries, and cannot access lifesaving information or resources, the divide is now more deadly. When women do have internet access, it can be a traumatic cyber war zone — 52% of young women online report experiencing online harassment.
Digital skills are soon to be a requirement, not a luxury for the global workforce — 90% of jobs are estimated to need digital skills in the next 10 years.
Many players are striving to bring more women access to the internet: Governments, telecoms, libraries, telecenters, NGOs, and women entrepreneurs are providing hardware solutions, basic digital literacy, and building women’s confidence with digital tools. Exciting cross-sector coalitions are beginning such as Equals.org. Unfortunately, many of the programs are still not coordinated enough, and in some cases, entities are duplicating efforts and even in competition with each other. For example, UNESCO has catalogued 833 digital skills programs that have sprouted up for women internationally, but many don’t even know that the others exist.
A Three-Step Solution: The Global Women’s Digital Leadership Ladder
In my years as CEO and Founder of World Pulse I’ve developed, in tandem with community leaders around the world, a three-step process that can address the access and skills gap and supercharge women’s leadership now, during a pandemic, and always.
The solution is a three-step process, building what I call, a “Global Women’s Digital Leadership Ladder.”
It’s time to invest in putting these steps together.
Step One: Create More Onramps
Coordinate more women’s access to the internet
We must open the door for more women to become digitally savvy by creating and coordinating more onramps. These onramps can be created by tackling the top, most pervasive barriers collectively: advocating for affordable and meaningful internet access, digital infrastructure investment, women-friendly spaces for learning, local women digital trainers, and dissemination of information and awareness through women’s networks.
Step Two: Connect
Link her to an ecosystem of online hubs and communities that enable confidence and opportunity
Once online, finding the right communities, resources, and opportunities can be daunting. With limited time and resources, finding what you want — or what you don’t yet know exists — is like finding a needle in a haystack. Negative experiences including cyber threats and harassment can cause women to drop offline.
We must fortify and link the best women-enabled online spaces. I believe the solution is not one central hub, which can be vulnerable to attack — but to support a thriving ecosystem of platforms and services that are tailored to meet women's needs to be heard, connected, informed, and resourced.
These include: Safe forums to develop her voice and confidence, inclusive and supportive online communities, locally relevant content, and opportunities for female perspectives to be channeled to influential forums to impact policy and media to influence culture.
These spaces can nurture women to incubate their messages and visions, to gather strength together and gain important supports where women can take their first few steps as a leader.
Step Three: Advance
Introduce women to curated leadership opportunities and resources
There are thousands of local and global training programs, funding opportunities, and educational opportunities for women. These can help them to advance their leadership skills so they can impactful political leaders, entrepreneurs, NGO leaders, scientists, journalists, technology professionals, and movement builders — including community-based humanitarian responders. The problem is that these opportunities are dispersed — and many have prerequisites and limitations. Finding the right opportunities takes time and energy, both of which are often limited to women changemakers, to find the right fit.
Curating and tagging these opportunities and hosting them so they’re easily discoverable through safe online platforms will shorten the timeframe for women to apply and access the right programs. This will fast-track a massive wave of formidable leaders across all sectors of society.
Connect Women, Heal the World
It is clearer than ever that women’s connected leadership is needed urgently to heal the world — and that we need to meet women in the spaces where they can still gather: right now, that’s virtually.
I’ve interviewed Jane Goodall twice over the past decade. Each time I’ve asked her, “What do you believe is the greatest lever today for solving the planetary crisis?” Each time, she has grinned wisely and said, “We must find a way to connect the women.”
Technology is one of the fastest tools we have in our hands that we can adapt to surface both women’s local solutions and collective wisdom. As we flatten the curve, we can also flatten patriarchal systems in the process, and bend the curve towards gender equality. Technology can foster a bottoms up, open source, knowledge commons that can act as a vaccine against dictatorship, extraction, inhumanity, corruption, and greed. If we continue to embed technology with harmful values, the earth’s ability to sustain life will be on an artificial tech-induced ventilator.
If we continue to embed technology with harmful values, the earth’s ability to sustain life will be on an artificial tech-induced ventilator.
In essence, the right combination of women’s leadership and technology can be the ultimate hack for global sustainability. We can use technology to unlock the voices and leadership of billions of women, voices that are still too buried today by oppressive systems and social norms. Design technology for women to thrive, and they will encode new values, norms, and solutions that will benefit us all.
As painful as it is, the pandemic is a test, offering up a crossroads and daring us to imagine new pathways to a new future. It’s our job to crank up the volume on these often-unheard voices, and support their linkages through communications technology, so that they can become an unstoppable, vibrant force for social and ecological restoration: quiet no more, loudly roaring with life.
Three Actions You Can Take to Make This a Reality
Here are three actions that would start to make this Global Women’s Digital Leadership Ladder a reality:
For individuals
Make your voice count for an urgent technology agenda that works for women, enabling them to lead a resilient post-pandemic future.
In partnership with dozens of leading digital women’s rights organizations, World Pulse has launched a new global campaign. It’s called #SheTransformsTech and it aims to crowdsource the voices and recommendations of women and girls from 190 countries to inform a more inclusive technology agenda that works for women and to make concrete recommendations for action. Findings will be delivered in a report to the technology industry, global decision-makers, digital rights coalitions, and the United Nations Women’s Beijing Platform for Action, the global blueprint for advancing women’s rights.
You can make your voice count by taking action with a few clicks: responding to the poll, posting your recommendations, and spreading the word to your networks by June 30th.
Decision-makers and funders
In all COVID-19 response, put women at the center and strengthen investments with a 10% Women’s Digital Dividend
If you’re a funder or decision-maker for COVID response initiatives, always put women at the center in line with these feminist policy recommendations, and prioritize funding directly to women’s funds and local grassroots groups with leaders of color. Also, to boost this investment, always allocate an additional 10% investment for technology infrastructure to support women’s access to information and resources, fortifying their ability to self-advocate and lead their own response efforts. There are also multiple women-led digital organizations that are working to strengthen each step of the ladder — from women’s online access to enabling online hubs, to advanced online leadership opportunities. Reach out to me if you need help identifying some. Be sure to include these as complementary investments that can boost the overall COVID response and rebuilding.
System-change funders
Invest in a collective impact fund to link the ladder and supercharge global women’s leadership.
Today, despite the massive potential, no major foundation, women’s fund, or investment fund exists for online feminist platforms and digital movement-building initiatives in the digital age. Concerted and coordinated investment is needed now to link the Women’s Digital Leadership Ladder before it’s too late. If the steps are not connected, any staircase will fall apart and become useless. It’s time to forge a groundbreaking collective impact fund with a multi-million dollar investment, guided by an advisory circle of global feminist organizers and technology experts. The fund will help convene, design, and support the backbone infrastructure to link the ladder ecosystem.
Leaders have already begun to convene from the women’s rights and technology sector to discuss the world’s first Global Women’s Digital Impact Fund and we welcome interested parties to reach out using the contact form. Common metrics will be designed to demonstrate women’s increased access to networks, resources, and a collective voice that results in local and global system change that improves human well-being and sustainability.
The opportunity to connect the vast array of small organizations, networks, and individual women changemakers across regions and sectors is knocking on our door. Let’s strengthen our ability to work together, putting those most impacted at the helm. Let’s open the door and leap forward as a united force.
