Bringing Youth Perspectives to the Forefront - and taking action - together.
A Glimpse into DOT’s Speaking Out Reaching Out, Country and Thematic Findings and African Youth’s Recommendations for Building Back Better
How to ensure young women feel safe and included in online platforms
We recently co-hosted an Equals Access Coalition Learning Session about our research into best practices to ensure young women feel safe and included in online platforms.
Led by our youth team at DOT South Africa, DOT has completed extensive user experience (UX) research into how young women in Africa and the Middle East can be supported to engage meaningfully in online platforms and overcome the significant barriers they face to equal participation.
In this presentation, DOT’s lead UX researcher Suzanne Newing shares some of the barriers faced by young women, and how organizations and platforms can help to bridge them.
Here is what we talked about during this virtual learning session on how to ensure young women feel safe and included in online platforms:
Young women have significantly less access to digital technology compared to young men – and when they do have access they lack the opportunities, training and safe online learning experiences for them to excel.
These barriers are driving the digital gender divide.
Over the years, DOT has become an expert in helping young women and girls feel safe online through a number of programs and projects across our network. Most recently, DOT conducted user experience and human centred design research among 300 youth – the majority of which were women – across 9 countries in Africa and the Middle East.
Our user experience research aimed to understand the barriers to women’s online participation, their safety and privacy preferences, and how we might create positive and valuable digital experiences for them – and through this, we developed a set of digital design principles aimed at creating safer and more inclusive online user experiences for women.
Young women are more likely to trust technology and feel safe engaging in online spaces when:
Young women are more likely to feel included in online spaces when:
Young women feel more comfortable learning how to use technology when:
Here are six key principles to consider when engaging young women online in a digital community, platform design or learning experience:
Read more
like this.
A Glimpse into DOT’s Speaking Out Reaching Out, Country and Thematic Findings and African Youth’s Recommendations for Building Back Better
DOT pledges along with 200+ Organizations to the ITU’s Partner2Connect Digital Coalition at WTDC 2022.