Missing in Action: Gender in Canada’s Digital Economy Agenda

Digital inequalities and why they matter

“…In 2012, women occupied about 24% of chief information officer positions at Fortune 100 companies (NCWIT, 2014). This absence of women is likely to persist into the next decade, as this gap is also present at the university level (Shade, 2014).…”

Digital Inclusion and Women’s Health and Well-Being in Rural Communities

“…The majority of the journal articles tended to be more focussed on the digital divide (Adhkari et al, 2017) and digital inclusion initiatives across a range of sub-groups in developing countries (Correa & Pavaz, 2016) and developed countries (Freeman & Park, 2015;Shade, 2014;Turkalj et al, 2013); the development of information literacy (Papen, 2013;Yu et al, 2017) and health information literacy (Enwald et al, 2016;Niemelä et al, 2012), or digital literacy skills Digital Inclusion and Women's Health and Well-Being, p-8 (Hughes et al, 2017); gender differences in attitudes and use of ICTs and the Internet (Singh, 2017); and the relationships between digital inclusion, digital inequalities and social inclusion (Park, 2017). Journal articles related to information literacy tended to come from the discipline of Information Science, although researchers in other fields used varying terminology such as multiliteracy, transliteracy, or digital literacy to describe aspects of information literacy (Aires, 2014).…”

“…Digital Inclusion and Women's Health and Well-Being, p-14 When describing approaches to digital inclusion initiatives, journal articles tend to use a macro-or micro-level perspective. Journal articles using a macro-level perspective take a topdown approach to describing digital inclusion and focus primarily on digital inclusion policy and agenda setting issues on a national or international scale (Hughes et al, 2018;Shade, 2014;Martínez-Cantos, 2017). This compares with journal articles taking a micro-level perspective, which look at specific local or regional digital inclusion projects and case studies (Madon et al, 2009).…”

“…However, other articles, such as Martínez-Cantos (2017), looked more towards gender differences in attitudes, self-efficacy, and the experiences of men and women in using computers and the Internet. Shade (2014) provides a critical overview of the changing digital inclusion agenda in Canada, describing how that country played an international role in promoting gender equity in access to the Internet. Yet in recent years, despite the continued persistent issue of digital exclusion, the government agenda of online gender equity has significantly diminished and there has been a gradual disinvestment in funding for programs for Internet access.…”

Digital Literacy in Digital Strategy

“…the fact that the consultation paper framed digital literacy this way delimited the ultimate recommendations of Digital Canada 150, despite the broad public engagement that was received. For example, even though well over 100 submissions discussed digital skills in multiple waysin relation to accessibility, indigenous communities, online privacy, and digital citizenship, for example-the ultimate recommendation of Digital Canada 150 was to create a Digital literacy taskforce oriented around the consumption of digital technologies as an economic driver (Shade, 2014); moreover, no such taskforce was actually created. instead, in 2018, the Ministry of innovation, Science and Economic Development announced a funding package of $29.5 million for a Digital literacy Exchange Program.…”