Women on the Web
With ingenuity and the Internet, cyber-feminism gains ground as a way to surmount social and physical barriers
By ALEXANDRA A. SENO
Why spend your Web time immersed in role-playing games when you can gather
support, exchange knowledge, build networks and fight oppression? Especially
when, because of your gender, the real world makes it hard to do those
things. "For boys, the Internet is mostly a toy, but for us it has become
so much more," says Irene Santiago. The Philippines-based feminist was
executive director of the landmark 1995 international women's conference
in Beijing. Now she is using the Net to put together a follow-up conference
in Manila in January 2000: communicating with other organizers, finding
resources, and publicizing the event through her web site www.women-lead.org.
"The Internet has been a great democratizing force," Santiago says. "And
for our cause in Asia, it has made a big difference."
Women in Asia are waking up to the possibilities of the Web --
from fostering dialogue to doing business to advocacy. For the women of
Afghanistan the Internet is making sure they are not forgotten. Since
the ultraconservative Islamist Taliban came to power three years ago,
women have been banned from working and risk being stoned to death for
accidentally exposing, say, an arm, in public. Their plight has inspired
one of the most aggressive examples of feminist cyberactivism. At least
a dozen organizations, like the Pakistan-based Revolutionary Association
of the Women of Afghanistan (www.rawa.org),
maintain sites campaigning against the repression. Other groups like the
U.S.-based Feminist Majority Foundation (www.feminist.org)
have instituted e-mail writing campaigns to keep up awareness and put
pressure on governments and international bodies to continue economic
sanctions.
At the opposite end of the
spectrum are women in the region's more economically-advanced countries.
There the issues may be less life-and-death and more breaking through
old-boy networks. Or of getting around them. "Women do business
differently than men," says Women-Connect-Asia.com publisher Rosemary
Brisco, a recent Singapore resident who is now based in California. "It
has been my experience that women like to do business with one another and
are far more supportive of each other than men." Brisco builds online
directories and sites for Asian women's organizations and companies. In
the emerging new economy, some women do not think of their gender as much
of a barrier at all. "There is no lack of opportunities for females where
I live," says Vivien Chiam, the co-founder of the 200-strong interest
group Singapore Women in Technology. "But we want to give Asian women a
competitive advantage by introducing them to others who they can do
business with." Chiam and a partner, Shelly Siu, will soon launch
FemmE-net, an international business networking forum for female
executives and entrepreneurs.
Even in places where women have a relatively high degree of
freedom, many cultural, physical and political obstacles remain,
such as the social pressure on Japanese women who marry to
quit their jobs and start families. But ingenuity and the
Internet are coming to their rescue. Cyber-feminist Okuyama
Mitsumi established the Japanese-language Office Will (www.macnet.or.jp/co/o-will/ow-index.html
) to link stay-at-home mothers with companies seeking to outsource
tasks like translation, desktop publishing and data-entry.
Says Rachel Howe, managing partner of Japan-specialist consultancy
DSA Analytics: "The Internet is helping to meet the combined
needs of Japan's restructuring economy -- the need to
cut costs -- with the traditional need of Japanese women
to be at home or the [modern] need to maintain skills to help
them survive outside the home."
The promise of women's online economic power in the U.S. has sparked
an explosion of female-oriented web sites and mega hubs like ivillage.com.
That may not happen here anytime soon (although Women.com is to launch
a Japanese version), but the Web's near-borderless nature means Asian
women can share in the information, much of it on such important but culturally
sensitive topics as reproductive health, birth control or crimes against
women. "In traditional Asian societies it is still difficult to find out
about topics like these," says Leslie Kenny of Dotmedia, a Hong Kong-based
web channel developer. "Women have long been a poorly served niche audience."
But the road ahead is long. Many
sites require proficiency in English. And access to computers is not a
given either. While in the U.S., about half the wired population is
female, even in Japan, Web consultancy Nikkei NetBusiness estimates only
35.5% is. One study determined only 4% of Internet-users in West Asia are
women. But as those numbers increase, so will the ranks of the virtually
liberated.
Other sites for women:
shoot.pacific.net.sg/herizon
Source: Asiaweek.com