From the press release: Intel Corporation released a groundbreaking report on “Women and the Web,” unveiling concrete data on the enormous Internet gender gap in the developing world and the social and economic benefits of securing Internet access for women. To better understand the gender gap, Intel commissioned this study and consulted with the U.S. […]

Social scientist Genevieve Bell – who is also the interaction and experience research director at Intel Labs – gave a major talk on what the future of technology looks like, and why middle-aged women may determine that future. The talk, entitled “Telling the Stories of the Future: Technology, Culture and What Really Matters”, was the […]

On International Women’s Day, the GSMA mWomen Programme released a study called “Striving and Surviving – Exploring the Lives of Women at the Base of the Pyramid,” reports MobileActive.org. Drawn from 2,500 interviews with women (aged 16-64 in both rural and urban areas) living on less that $2 a day in Egypt, India, Papua New […]

MobileActive has posted an in-depth new case study that focuses on evaluating mobile health interventions. Written by Kate Otto, the case study looks at testing the efficacy of using mobile phones in health care in Ethiopia. A team of researchers from The World Bank and Addis Ababa University developed a mobile tool that enables rural […]

Chip maker and technology group Intel says that women are emerging as the dominant users of technology and if it continues to enhance its ease of use, the fairer sex will continue to dominate the adoption of technology. This is the opinion of Genevieve Bell, Intel fellow and director of interaction and experience research, who […]

Smart Design’s think tank presents an ongoing discussion of how gender should be included in good design – all published in a new series on Fast Company. The Femme Den started thinking about gender and design five years ago as an expansion of Smart Design’s commitment to understanding people. Introduction Smart Design’s think tank presents […]

Danah Boyd, researcher at Microsoft Research New England and Fellow at the Harvard Berkman Center for Internet and Society, wrote a long post on the social factors involved in celebritization. “As information swirls all around us, we have begun to build an attention economy where the value of a piece of content is driven by […]

Targeting women with mobile phones and mobile-based projects can bring great benefits and opportunities, as MobileActive outlined in Part 1 of its series on women and mobiles [see also this blog post]. But, there is a “darker side” to this world, which includes changes in gender relations and power dynamic, a potential increase in violence, […]

As mobile penetration increases across the developing world, the entry of mobile phones in the hands of women causes reactions. In many cases, mobile phone ownership empowers women in myriad ways: economic gains, increased access to information, greater autonomy and social empowerment, and a greater sense of security and safety. But, there is a darker […]

Female Interaction is a 2.5 year, DKK 4.7 mio (630,000 euro / 850,000 usd) multidisciplinary research project focusing on female interaction design for advanced electronic products, in particular on how to make these products attractive and convenient to use for females – and for the rest of the world User-driven development methods and tools are […]

AIGA has uploaded the videos of the 2010 Gain conference. Erica Eden, senior industrial designer at Smart Design, and co-founder at Femme Den, was one of the speakers with her talk “Designing (for) Women: Bridging the Gap Between Assumptions and Realities“. Femme Den, said the host introducing Erica on the video, “is a group inside […]

Frank Spillers thinks the User Experience community has not fully tapped the potential of gender-specific design aka Woman-centered Design. According to Spillers, gender as an audience sensitive criteria (differentiation) is barely present in North American technology product design (where it is much easier to do) let alone Web experiences. In Asia there is more design […]

Indrani Medhi, an Associate Researcher at Microsoft Research India where she works in the Technology for Emerging Markets team, designed a text free user interface for illiterate populations. “A student of design, Medhi has developed text-free user interfaces (UIs) to allow any illiterate or semi-literate person on first contact with a computer, to immediately know […]

Women & Mobile: A Global Opportunity is a study on the mobile phone gender gap in low and middle-income countries. Mobile phone ownership in low and middle-income countries has skyrocketed in the past several years. But a woman is still 21% less likely to own a mobile phone than a man. Closing this gender gap […]

Mobile phones have been a boon to developing countries and to social development. Access to mobiles may indeed allow for better medical information, change the way farmers grow and sell crops, expand the way families interact, influence the way governments treat their citizens, and improve the way students learn in schools. But, asks MobileActive in […]

Canada’s International Development Research Center and Harvard’s Berkman Center convened a conversation at Harvard yesterday on the future of information and communication technology and development (ICT4D). Nobel Laureates Amartya Sen and Michael Spence joined Information and Communication Technology (ICT) experts Yochai Benkler and Clotilde Fonseca in a public discussion of the role of communication and […]