National Women’s Education Center of Japan

　From Friday, 14th to Monday 31st October 2022, National Women’s Education Center (NWEC) held FY2022 NWEC Global Seminar on the theme of ‘Does Digital Technology Advance Gender Equality?’.
This year’s seminar featured on-demand videos of the keynote speech and introduction of selected cases from Japan and overseas, and live streaming of the panel discussion.

　As the ICT pervades our daily lives, it has become essential to reconsider digital technology and innovations initiatives from the perspective of gender and to incorporate more diverse needs and requirements. Evidentially, the priority theme of the 67th UN Commission on the Status of Women (CSW), to be held in 2023, is also “Innovation and technological change, and education in the digital age for achieving gender equality and the empowerment of all women and girls.” This seminar presented insights and discussions by selected speakers who are active in various fields and aspire to innovate and develop digital technology that would contribute to the advancement of gender equality while taking into account its diverse needs.

Ms. Dorothy Gordon, Chair of Information for All Programme, UNESCO　
　The keynote speech covered topics ranging from challenges in promoting gender equality to opportunities and challenges in technologies. It also highlighted that the technology was neither inherently good nor bad and it was a mirror that reflects ambitions and intentions of the people. As the opportunities of the digital technology to close the gender gap were described such that data enabled quick research, and the online tools made retraining and upskilling accessible. It also drew our attention to the issues with regard to further promote human resource development to eliminate algorithm bias, and the issue of surveillance capitalism. Ms. Gordon ended her speech with a call for the audience to take action for themselves in order to create the society they want.

United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO)
　This video presented the issues of gender bias in AI, the fact that the vast majority working in machine learning or AI are men; and the need for diversity in AI in order to build a resilient and prosperous society. On this occasion, NWEC made Japanese subtitles of this video in collaboration with UNESCO.

Dr. Kalpana Viswanath, Co-Founder / CEO of Safetipin
　Dr. Viswanath shared an initiative in India and around the world for safety in urban public spaces, such as public roads and bus stops. The responsibility for unpaid care work in India and worldwide falls disproportionately on women involved in raising children, housework and chores, nursing care, etc., and ensuring safe mobility without the risk or fear of violence will protects women’s rights to work and study. The presentation introduced how data collected from the bottom up, using the 'Safetipin' app developed for women's safe mobility, is being used by the governments, researchers and NGOs to help empower women.

Ms. Salam Al-Nukta, Founder / CEO of ChangeMakers, a member of Generation Equality Youth Task Force
　Ms. Al-Nukta shared her experience of establishing ChangeMakers in 2016 to provide IT education for young people in Syria. In particular, she mentioned how having everyone, including women, participate in technological development leads not only to job creation and economic growth but also to social change and peace building. It was also shared that she organized the courses for both men and women in the same environment in order to close the gender gap in the field of digital technology. Ms. Nukta described the strategy of involving students’ family and community to overcome the social norm such as ‘Technology is for boys’ and ‘If a girl studies science and technology she will neglect the home,’. She proudly reported that ChangeMakers enabled more girls to make informed decisions about pursuing academic and career paths in technology.

Dr. Yoshimi Ui, CEO of aba Inc.
　Ms Ui shared her experience developing and commercializing nursing care robots to create a society in which technology makes everyone willing to engage in care work. From her own experience of caring for a family member, she carried out research on nursing care robots that reduce the burden on caregivers, developed the Helppad, a sheet fitted with sensors to detect odors, and is promoting care-tech that, by using AI to predict excretion patterns from data recorded in the Cloud, will reduce the burden on both caregivers and those they care for. In order to ‘build a society where careers aren’t stopped by childrearing or nursing care’ she promotes the working environment in which all employees can continue to work regardless of their responsibility at home, and showcased initiatives aimed at using technology to tackle the challenges in aging society.

　Referring to Keynote Speech and Selected Cases, three Japanese panelists from academia, education sector particularly for girls and women and civil society to apply ICT for solving social issues discussed what is our role to advance gender equality as digital technology pervade into our daily lives. The president of NWEC, Natsuko Hagiwara coordinated the discussion.

　Prof. Tadashi Kobayashi, Director-General of the Research Institute of Science and Technology for Society (RISTEX) at the Japan Science and Technology Agency (JST) and Professor Emeritus of Osaka University, emphasized the point that RISTEX is funding research that integrates the humanities and sciences, and that femtech research is the meaningful study considering the women make up half of the population. He also mentioned gender shades issues which algorithmic bias with regard to race and gender manifested in the accuracy of facial recognition by AI.

　Ms. Sayaka Tanaka, co-founder of Nonprofit Organization Waffle, presented data showing that while there was no apparent gender difference in interest in computers at elementary school, in middle- and high-school students the male:female ratio dropped to 20:1, and that there are few females interested in entering the department of engineering in university, or in working in the field of IT; and she raised the issue that girls’ career choices were affected by such bias. She described the change in the awareness and behavior of female students who have participated in the ICT learning opportunities for female students provided by Waffle, and shared how the knowledge gained from their activities also leads to policy recommendations.

　Mr. Kenichiro Fukushima, Director Representative of Code for Kanazawa, defines Civic Tech as ‘Actions by local citizens to create the society we want, and the technology itself needed for the actions’. Giving the example of a software app providing useful childrearing information that was developed mainly by mothers, he described the common feature of Civic Tech as using technology to solve problems by looking at social issues as what we ourselves have something to do. In addition, he also explained the role of gender tech in solving all kinds of problems, such as apps that allow children to learn that there are many great women as role models.

　In the latter half of the session, a lively discussion unfolded on the need of a mechanism that allows a variety of people, regardless of gender or age, to participate in the development and improvement of technology as something that concerns us personally, as well as on the factors that limit the participation of women in the technology field.

　This was a meaningful seminar in which a wide variety of opinions were exchanged as to what each one of us can do in order to promote gender equality.