The Future of Sustainability is in Women: Gendered Perspective of Smart City Advancement
“Investing in women is smart economics, and investing in girls, catching them upstream is even smarter economics.” — Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala
In the current age of technology and the internet, urban planners are turning to Smart Cities as the answer for sustainable developments. Smart Cities are being developed as frameworks utilising Information and Communication Technologies to develop, deploy, and promote sustainable development practices to address growing urbanisation and sustainability challenges.
Before delving into Smart City advancement challenges, let’s take a step back and look at sustainability, more precisely the UN-defined Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) which are driving the push towards Smart Cities. The Sustainable Development Goals are a collection of 17 interlinked global goals created as a blueprint towards achieving a better and more sustainable future for all. The outlined goals encompass economic, environmental, and social dimensions of development and act as a call to action for global systems to secure a sustainable future.
Listed among the top goals is the achievement of gender equality, this goal is not only defined as a fundamental human right but a necessary foundation for a peaceful, prosperous, and sustainable world.
Increased studies are highlighting that gender equality and environmental goals are mutually reinforcing.
“Women experience differentiated effects from environmental factors and are often most affected by environmental degradation due to socio-economic and discriminatory factors. At the same time, women express more “green” attitudes in their personal choices, and could greatly contribute to the transition to a low-carbon economy” — OECD
And herein lies a challenge facing Smart Cities. While these are being seen as the ideal solution to rising sustainability problems, the technology-centred nature, as well as the gender blinded approaches used in their advancement, are increasingly being criticised.
Governments transitioning towards Smart City initiatives are continuously being challenged by gender-based questions. What does it mean for women when governments build gender-blind Smart City initiatives into the urban spaces around them?
Key Dimensions driving gender dilemmas in the Smart City space:
Women in local politics
Only one of six mayors in the EU is a woman, a figure that has only increased by four per cent over the last ten years.
Women and/in ICT
The low representation of women in ICT-based professions leads to having male-dominated teams of ICT designers. Gendered digital divides (along with class, ethnicity, age, and disability) negatively affect women’s empowerment as smart citizens.
Gender blind urban innovation
Gender studies on innovation criticise techno-centric visions of innovation which are characterised as being blind in terms of social and environmental impact. It is recognised that including women among stakeholders in innovation networks likely increases the robustness of innovations. On the other hand, focusing only on ICT and manufacturing leads to an oversight in methodological and even technological innovations that women bring in the sectors where they are mainly occupied e.g., service, and primary sectors.
AI industries and technologies appear to be set on a course to exacerbate gender inequality significantly unless a targeted intervention is undertaken. Primarily, this is, according to recent research, because a powerful feedback loop of gender bias exists within the technology industry, further entrenching the systematic lack of diversity in the AI workforce that then builds bias into AI systems.
Not only does an overwhelmingly male AI workforce often fail to predict and identify the potential gender-related social harms caused by their creations, but AI technologies also continue to shroud themselves in a mystique that serves to exclude those who could.
If we truly want to drive the change for a better urban life, women are not an optional inclusion into the decision-making processes, they are essential.
— Tamlyn Shimizu, BABLE Smart Cities
It is crucial to build the gendering of Smart City initiatives on an understanding of the diverse social, political, and economic barriers faced by women if governments hope to avoid inadvertently exacerbating these barriers. Policymakers working with smart city projects must also ensure to check for gender-specific needs and use them in all smart city designs — analysing for gendered outcomes and unintended consequences of Smart City policies.
History has proven that gender issues are often sensitive and difficult to be tackled. Nevertheless, a focus on gender issues is paramount in assessing Smart City governance strategies towards the promotion of inclusion, legitimacy, and the generation of public value. Adopting gender attentive governance approaches serve to make Smart Cities more democratic, legitimate, and responsive to public needs.
Further still, the ability to mainstream gender issues in the definition of smart policies and services allows decision-makers to better allocate public resources to improve the local economies, sustainability, and wellbeing — the goal of a smart city!
References
European Parliament (2012). The role of women in the green economy. The issue of mobility
Sangiuliano, M. (2017). Smart Cities and Gender: main arguments and dimensions for a promising research and policy development area.
Martin, B, (2020). Resisting gender blindness in smart cities. Asia and the Pacific Policy Society
Nesti, Giorgia (2019). Mainstreaming gender equality in smart cities: Theoretical, methodological and empirical challenges. Information Polity, 24(3), 289–304.
