Innovation, a driver of change to promote gender equality

With financing from the Ministry for Europe and Foreign Affairs, Hélène Molinier (@HeleneMolinier ), an international technical expert at Expertise France, serves as Senior Policy Advisor to UN Women in New York in the Innovation Facility. She tells us about ways to ensure that innovation and technology advance progress towards gender equality and the empowerment of women and girls.

Under what conditions can technology promote gender equality?

Hélène Molinier: UN Women has identified three priority thematic areas. It is first of all important to reduce inequalities in access to professions related to innovation. We still find few women in STEM sectors (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics): at university, only 3% of female students have graduated in computer science. This can be put down to the fact that there is less access to technologies: in Africa, women have 25% less access to Internet than men. There are also persistent stereotypes: that boys are better at maths, that certain professions are made for men… With no female models working in technologies around them, it is therefore harder for young women to see themselves in this type of career – which, on the contrary, needs to be promoted.

It subsequently involves ensuring that all innovations take the needs of women into account. For example, many “health” applications have been developed with no maternity mode or no option to monitor the menstrual cycle. Some technologies can even contribute to perpetuating discriminations. In 2017, Amazon scrapped its software for automatically sorting CVs when it realised that it gave a low rating to women’s CVs for technical positions – because artificial intelligence had “deduced” from the recruitment record (mainly male) that it was preferable to recruit men. When algorithms are based on data from an unequal society, the analyses can be biased and this needs to be taken into account.

Finally, innovations need to meet the needs of all women, not only those in developed countries. Projects which focus on telephones are interesting from this point of view: solutions can be implemented for people who do not have access to public services, banking products… For example, with a telephone you can have information on reproductive health, which is not widely available in certain communities. UN Women is also currently testing the use of blockchain technology to make cash transfers to Syrian women who are refugees and benefit from its “cash-for-work” programme. It is therefore a tool which can be a game-changer. But these new opportunities sometimes cause negative reactions among those who believe that women should not empower themselves. This is where the complexity of our work lies: how to offer new opportunities without creating more risks.

How does UN Women’s Innovation Unit contribute to more effectively mainstreaming gender in innovation?

Hélène Molinier: In addition to our awareness-raising and advocacy work, we provide technical assistance to UN Women’s projects that want to use new technologies: come up with ideas, integrate these technologies into projects, identify implementation partners…  

It is very important to establish links between the teams which develop the program (often social scientists) and the technical teams: it involves assisting them to ensure that certain concepts are “translated” better into technological language, and raising awareness of the limits of technology. The latter is simply a tool, never a solution in itself: everything does not change by replacing paper with a telephone. In the context of a project with women farmers, a digital platform helped connect them to producers, but if the systems are not in place in real life, the technology is not going to create them.

In what way are partnerships with the private sector important?

Hélène Molinier: The UN and States will not be able to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) alone. So, we have created a pilot partnership: the Global Innovation Coalition for Change (GICC).

This coalition is based on the principle that the private sector should be considered as an agent of change. It is a new form of partnership, which is not confined to asking the private sector for financing: it involves identifying together the barriers for women in innovation and the measures which companies can take at their level – more parity in innovation teams; more communication on the subject; mentoring for women working in this field; and the definition of principles to mainstream gender into innovation in order to help organisations integrate this aspect into their innovation cycle, from the design to the deployment.

How is France positioned on this issue?

Hélène Molinier: France, which is chairing the G7 this year, is keeping up the momentum of Canada, by including gender in all the discussions. The Consultative Committee on Gender Equality also contributes to the visibility of this issue.

In New York, the Permanent Representative of France actively supports these issues, on both development issues and humanitarian subjects. For example, in the Sahel region, the most innovative programmes are not strictly to do with security: they are development programmes (fight against poverty, economic empowerment, etc.), which involve women. When we improve the lives of women, we contribute to building a stronger peace.