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Air conditioners, washing machines, cable television. Balbir, a retired cook, has embraced them all. But there is one innovation that isn’t welcome in his home: the smartphone.
Mr. Balbir, who goes by one name, can afford one. They sell for less than $50 in India these days. But he fears the freedom that comes with them could lead his daughters astray.
“They start talking and the next thing you will have a love marriage or she will run away with a boy,” said Mr. Balbir, who has forbidden his girls from having cellphones. He has a cellphone not connected to the internet for calls only.
Such attitudes have helped create a new kind of digital purdah for tens of millions of Indian women, who are finding themselves barred by fathers and husbands from taking advantage of technological leaps that benefit men.
In India, 114 million more men than women have cellphones. That represents more than half the total world-wide gap of around 200 million between men and women who possess phones, according to GSMA, an international cellphone-industry group.
But in countries such as India, the new technology is exacerbating an already deep gender gap. The gulf is blocking women from increasingly crucial ways of communicating and learning, and making it harder for them to find work, upgrade their skills and assert political rights.
In India, millions use smartphones to find jobs, bank, study, order train tickets, interact with the government and more. Offline options require freedom of movement not available for many women, and extra time and cost in traveling, standing in lines and filling out forms.
“Mobile phones, especially smartphones, are going to be the biggest challenge to achieving gender equity,” said Osama Manzar, founder of the nonprofit Digital Empowerment Foundation, which helps marginalized groups get access to technology. “Denying them to women means lost opportunity for women and the economy.”
India has one of the most-skewed sex ratios in the world, with men significantly outnumbering women, the result of selective abortion, infanticide and neglect. Girls suffer disproportionately from malnutrition and are less likely to be in school. Families invest their resources in sons.
In parts of rural India, village councils, which effectively dictate community norms, have issued decrees barring unmarried women from possessing cellphones. Even in the fast-modernizing cities of the world’s largest democracy, men routinely prevent women in their families from getting phones.
Fathers and husbands say phones could lead to sexual promiscuity, or at the very least give women a reputation for moral laxity. They also argue that money is better spent on boys, and that technology, like education, is wasted on women who will eventually be married off to another family.
In Lalpur, a village in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh, leaders recently ordered mobile phones confiscated from every woman under age 18 after a local teacher, who had used a smartphone, was arrested on charges of molesting one of his students.
“Mobile phones are really dangerous for women,” said Ram Sanhaiya, a village elder. “Girls are more susceptible to bringing shame upon themselves.”
That is a deeply held cultural conviction in large swaths of South Asia, where women face violence for defying conservative norms.
In Pakistan, a 26-year-old social media star, Fauzia Azeem, was strangled in July. Her brother was arrested on suspicion of her murder and told police he had killed his sister because her posts on Facebook, deemed too racy by conservative critics, had brought dishonor to the family.
In India, 28% of females have cellphones compared with 43% of men, one of the largest gender gaps in the world, according to GSMA. That compares to a gap of just 1 percentage point in China.
In India around 30% of internet users are female, according to estimates by the Internet and Mobile Association of India. A government survey in 2014 found that only around 9% of females surveyed knew how to do an internet search or send email on a phone or computer, compared with more than 16% of males surveyed.
The country has close to three men on Facebook for every woman, according to consultancy We Are Social. In most other parts of the world the ratio is about one to one.
In the country’s capital, where there are cell towers in every slum and advertisements extolling the virtues of smartphones are ubiquitous on billboards and television, young women know they are missing out.
Danger for girls
“My daughter wants a smartphone but I say no,” said Mr. Balbir, the former cook, as the 13-year-old girl served him a cup of tea. They live in a two-room apartment in a ramshackle Delhi settlement wedged between a potholed road and railroad tracks.
He understood phones could help his daughters with their studies and increase their safety when they are outside. If he had sons he would get them phones, he said. But for girls, he thought, the danger is too great.
“If a girl is walking on the road playing music on her phone, what will people think? They’ll say she isn’t a decent girl,” Mr. Balbir said.
His youngest daughter, 7, said nothing. She sat near her father on the bed that took up half of one of the rooms in their simple home and played with a broken phone. His demure older daughter looked down and smiled when asked what she thought of her father’s phone ban.
“If my father allows me to use a phone, then I will use it,” she said. “Otherwise I won’t.”
A neighbor, a 17-year-old girl, said she resents the fact that her parents have bought phones for her three brothers but not for her and her sister.
When she was in school, other students had access to phones and computers to help with their homework. She said she had to walk to an internet cafe and ask the manager to print out information she needed for reports. She said she had been looking for a job in an office but without the internet had to depend on word-of-mouth.
She picked up one of her brother’s phones once when he wasn’t looking but didn’t know how to unlock it, she said.
She said a job would help her plan a better life. “My parents will get me married soon and I will have no say in it,” she said.
Development boost
Economists say getting more women into India’s workforce would give the country a much-needed development boost. Women made up only 27% of India’s workforce in 2014, according to the International Labor Organization, down from 36% in 2004.
Telecom and tech companies say the women locked offline represent a huge pool of potential sales. GSMA estimates that if women owned as many phones as men, it could mean more than $30 billion a year in revenue for phone companies around the world, $3.5 billion of that in India.
Micromax Informatics Inc., India’s largest local cellphone brand, has been trying to target women by creating affordable handsets, local-language operating systems and a line of phones with more fashionable styling.
“There is clearly a gender divide, and that gets worse in the smaller towns,” said Shubhajit Sen, chief marketing officer at Micromax. “We are still trying to find that one killer insight that will really unlock the adoption” by women, he said.
Micromax said a concern for safety is one of the reasons it hoped families would increasingly buy phones for their female members. It is designing a panic button for its phones that women could use to notify friends, family and police when they are in trouble.
Karbonn Mobile India Pvt., one of India’s largest phone manufacturers, said it would launch new models with panic buttons in January.
The Indian arm of Norway’s Telenor ASA has a network of village women going door-to-door selling sim cards paired with a deep discount on calls if purchased by a woman. The idea is to give men the financial incentive to get their female family members a phone. It also puts on street theater to sensitize men about why women should be allowed to have phones.
The Helping Get Women Online program by Alphabet Inc.’s Google has launched a fleet of thousands of bicycles to villages across India offering women free access to the internet, tablets and smartphones as well as training them what they can do online. It plans to eventually reach women in more than 300,000 villages in India.
MasterCard, the Clinton Global Initiative and India’s Tata Communications are trying to bring the benefits of the internet to 100 million women in developing countries, starting this year by working with micro lenders to distribute used smartphones and build affordable, rugged networks.
In Lalpur, the village where elders ordered girls’ phones to be confiscated, the men’s central concern appeared to be preserving the social order.
At a gathering, Mr. Sanhaiya, one of the village elders, said phones in the hands of women would bring too much change too quickly to Lalpur. “Women should be allowed to talk over the phone as little as possible,” he said.
Lakhan Singh Arya said it was a father’s duty to protect his daughter because someday she would marry into another family. “A daughter is someone else’s asset,” he said. “They must be more cautious, and we have to go an extra mile to protect her honor.”
Write to Eric Bellman at eric.bellman@wsj.com
Source: The Wall Street Journal
