Jensine Larsen is the founder of World Pulse, a global digital network connecting tens of thousands of women from 190 countries and bringing them a greater global voice

Around 50% of the world’s women are online, and this number is growing. This presents an unprecedented opportunity to engage groups of women — and community leaders — in dialogue across every region of the world.

We now have the power to listen to women on a massive scale, changing policy and culture faster than ever before on the road to gender equity.

Over the past decade, I‘ve seen first-hand how technology can help ordinary women to speak out and create change. I founded World Pulse, a safe social network and storytelling platform connecting tens of thousands of women from across 190 countries. I know it’s possible to consciously design sustainable online spaces where women can express their deeply-held views and be heard.

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When we ask women to share stories, we hear back from women in boats in Central America using their cell phones to transmit the stories of fisherwomen. Citizen journalists in West Africa trek for eight hours to collect stories from illiterate women and girls in remote islands of the Niger Delta. We’ve crowdsourced women’s views on pressing issues like digital inclusion, peace and security, and Covid-19. We helped the US State Department, the International Parliamentary Union, the World Bank, the United Nations, and major media and technology companies to hear these women. Here’s what we’ve learned about getting women’s voices online.

Set quotas for the underrepresented voices you want to hear

Your consultation is not complete without ensuring that you’ve heard from people with lived experiences that are often overlooked. This might include disabled people, widows, adolescent girls, non-binary people, indigenous people, immigrants, or the elderly. If you want communities to respond to your policies or programmes, be specific. Broad categories, like ‘women’, won’t help you pick out the right groups to speak to. By default you’ll hear from those most like you, with the most privilege, access, and power.

We must recognise that local women leaders have excellent strategies to better reach and engage offline populations, and they know what is needed to bring these groups online.

Instead, identify those who are least likely to be heard and work with local community networks to find them. Extend a warm invitation and be explicit that you want to hear from them.

Offer participants something — don’t just take from them

It takes time, brainpower, and hassle for stay-at-home mums, market women, and pregnant teens to provide their wisdom and expertise. Don’t assume they are happy to do it for free, even if it is a three question survey on their cell phone.

Ensure that you are giving something back. This could be free cell phone minutes, grocery coupons, a tax reduction — or simply a commitment to give visibility to their stories and testimonies so they are seen and counted.

You should give explicit assurances that you’ll give what you say you will, regardless of the content of their feedback. Be accountable and make sure participants know exactly how their voices and data will be used — and that they’ve given informed consent. Have a plan for how you’ll get back to your participants: they will want to know exactly where their voices were heard, when, and what happened as a result.

Partner with safe, ethical, women-led platforms

If you plan to use commercial platforms to engage women online, data ethics and content moderation are a concern. For example, if you set up a virtual conference, there is real risk that those who share sensitive content might find themselves under attack. While these conferences are increasingly common, most leave it up to novice organisers to ensure safe online moderation.

Non-commercial platforms designed and led by women as safe spaces are rare. But we should expect to see more of these as people across the world grow disillusioned with the corporate technology sector. Safe platforms must have a code of ethics. They must prioritise features that are designed by women, and be built in a way that is empowering and user friendly.

Engage and equip networks of local leaders

Women community leaders, women’s movements, and women’s organisations can best reach excluded women: the offline, illiterate, and vulnerable. When equipped with technology, digital skills, and organising resources, these groups will lead the process with gusto. They’re motivated — and trusted — to collect input in a transformative way and ethically upload and transmit it.

They may sit on bamboo mats, in village centres or living rooms. They often reach marginalised women through the radio. They may pass out brochures, or carefully conduct consults over video while taking phone calls. In many cases, they pass on digital skills and online safety tips so that participants can eventually speak for themselves. I call these ‘daisy chains’: resourceful women-led networks who find several ways to establish dialogue with the least heard.

Get women to set the agenda

When you want to hear from excluded women, use open-ended questions. In your surveys and interviews, ask: “What should we be asking you? Anything else you want us to know?” Put that data together and identify trends that can inform the work and your decisions. Perhaps you’ll discover important new questions you hadn’t seen before. You might find that your original framework needs significant reworking.

We have the power to pass the microphone to multitudes of women

Giving women access to the internet hasn’t been a priority in many places. In fact, when researchers have looked at data measuring access to the internet worldwide, they uncovered that many existing studies do not centre or examine meaningful access for women. So we don’t even know the scale of the exclusion challenge. We do know that half of the world’s women are still offline, and so some might dismiss technology as a way to engage the excluded ones.

In fact, it’s just the opposite. We must recognise that local women leaders have excellent strategies to better reach and engage offline populations, and they know what is needed to bring these groups online.

For example, World Pulse supported 130 women to become digital voice ambassadors across 30 countries who conduct digital skills training and raise awareness in their communities to bring the voices of women and girls online. They reach over one million globally. Meanwhile, the Rwandan government is equipping 5000 youth digital ambassadors, including young women, to bring digital literacy to five million Rwandans. There is a vast network of women-led organisations, and digital skills programmes, doing similar work across the globe.

It is possible to build out a global daisy chain of digitally empowered community communicators, and link them together as they seek out and listen to excluded women. This is important because Covid-19 is accelerating digital transformation. In the future, more meetings will incorporate virtual elements, market forces will bring more people online than ever before, and governments will make more and more use of their data. We’ll need a robust global public digital infrastructure to be ready for future pandemics.

As the author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie says in her famous TED talk, there is “danger in a single story.” Investing now in the digital tools and communities that support women’s leadership and centre their experiences can bring a critical mass of historically underrepresented women’s voices to the front of the line. This will ensure that when leaders need to make quick decisions on major global challenges — like pandemics, climate change, natural disasters, conflict, and economic disruption — they are more likely to benefit everyone. — Jensine Larsen

This is the second part of a series. Read part one: ‘Six ways women are shut out of decision-making’.

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Picture Credit: Carolyn Seaman (used with permission)