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This article provides information about New Job Opportunity and Challenges faced by Women in Knowledge Society !
The emerging knowledge societies, which are based on global competition, progress in information technologies and a move towards knowledge-based economy, pose several opportunities and challenges to women.
Image Courtesy : w-teconline.org/blog/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/Young-Women.jpg
The New Job Opportunities for Women:
The new ICTs enabled the work to be brought to homes and allows for better accommodation of work and family schedules and this created new types of jobs that favoured women.
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Women have also been able to capture a large proportion of jobs in ICTs-enabled services. The most promising potential for women is in the creation of new jobs at call centres and in work involving data processing.
The ILO reports “tele-centres and fax booths have created a quarter of a million jobs in India in the last four years alone, a huge proportion of which have gone to women”. By the end of the 1990s, almost 5000 women in the Caribbean countries were employed in data processing activities. The ILO Report adds, “in terms of numbers employed, the role of women in the digital economy has become more marked in on-line, export- oriented information-processing work rather than in telecommuting”.
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Internationally outsourced jobs, such as medical transcription work or software services, do make a considerable difference to the lives and career paths of women in developing countries. In software, women enjoy preferences on a scale that they never experienced in any other field of engineering and science. Women in India occupy 27 per cent of professional jobs in the software industry, which is worth 4 billion US dollars annually. Women’s share in the employment total in that industry mounted to 30 per cent in 2001.
The ICTs have enabled women to tap global markets for their products and raised incomes. New technologies and networking are new means by which women are empowered to improve their economic and social status. Let us see some examples. Sapphire Women, created by a woman in Kampala, Uganda, is an organisation that supports women who have lost family members to AIDS, as well as supporting orphans created by the AIDS epidemic. The members of Sapphire weave traditional Ugandan baskets which are then sold on the Internet with the help of Peopling, an American-based NGO with extensive experience in on-line sales of handicrafts.
The Grameen Bank Village Phone project, which provides mobile cell phones to its mostly female members in Bangladesh, demonstrates not only the employment-generating impact of the women who collect fees for the usage of their mobile phones, but other positive spill-over effects as well. Mobile phones and access to the Internet have given rural Bangladeshi women access to learning, created new opportunities for autonomy and improved their position in community and public life.
These examples illustrate how technology can improve the lives of poor women by opening up opportunities they were previously excluded from. Electronic networking between women has led to new social and economic phenomena, such as e-campaigns, e-commerce and e- consultation. The empowerment of women via technology in this way enables them to challenge discrimination and overcome gender barriers (ILO).