2024 Gender Report

Midway to the deadline for the 2030 education targets, the 2024 Gender Report due out on Girls in ICT day (25 April) assesses the progress made towards achieving gender parity across all levels of education. While examples of stubborn exclusion remain, the report tells a positive story at the global level for girls’ access and education attainment over the past two decades.

A companion to the 2023 GEM Report, A tool on whose terms?, this gender edition asks in what circumstances technology is helping with gender equality in education. While in some instances technology can provide a lifeline for girls otherwise altogether excluded from education, there remain gender divides in access to technology and acquisition of digital skills. 

Technology can also facilitate access to specific valuable content, such as comprehensive sexuality education, access to which is often constrained. But in calling for technology to be ‘on her terms’, the report challenges countries to consider when technology puts the concept of a safe learning environment at risk, and whether the design of some technology is entrenching negative social norms and gender stereotypes into children’s everyday lives. 

The extent to which girls are encouraged and empowered to build on their mathematics skills in the early years to take them through to science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) studies and ultimately careers is suggested as the key to ensuring that technological design will work for everyone in the future. The report posits that education has a critical role to play in determining whether the future direction that the digital transformation may take us in will be gender-balanced or not.