SIGIS: Strategies of Inclusion

Last month, Jill asked "Why aren't more European women online?" The Strategies of Inclusion web site is a product of the EU Information Society Technologies (IST) project is attempting to answer that.

For a long time there has been a concern that women are excluded from computers and thus from the information society. Still, women are relatively absent from computer science and the design of ICT products. However, there are important changes going on: the transformation of ICTs and their penetration into the home, education and the workplace means the level of use of computers, the internet, mobiles phones and other systems by women and men is converging. Moreover, in many European countries this is the result of explicit public and private initiatives to include women.

This project has analysed 30 such initiatives and related processes of inclusion, partly to study the strategic features, partly to learn from relative successes, and partly to provide a knowledge base to support and encourage development of new inclusion efforts. This is needed to safeguard the development of an information society for all, but it is also an important prerequisite of commercial success of many new ICT projects.

The site includes case studies and analysis, as well as reviews of literature and statistics on the topic. They've also got a symposium coming up in January that looks quite interesting. (The same page has information on some recent conferences and calls for papers.)