The Director of the Division for Gender Equality of UNESCO, Ms. Saniye Gülser Corat, participated in the first US symposium on “Technology and Women: Protection and Peril” organized on 20-21 October at the Evelyn Jacobs Ortner Center on Family Violence, University of Pennsylvania.

Technology is an increasingly important topic of conversation in society and, particularly, within the criminal justice system and the specific issue of Violence Against Women (VAW). However, the conversations are generally disconnected and occur typically in silos – with some conversations being only about offenders and other conversations focusing only on victims.

This symposium aimed at creating connectivity across content areas and perspectives, taking an approach that included offender behavior, effects on victims, criminal justice intervention and ethical issues related to technology and VAW.

The symposium was organized in different thematic sessions with a wide range of topics: from law enforcement and survivor safety, to Big data and social media use to learn more about VAW. Ms. Corat participated in all the sessions, together with 25 other experts in the field.

Ms. Corat was the featured key-note speaker of the closing session. She gave a talk entitled “Through the Magnifying Glass: Technology and Violence Against Women” where she addressed how Internet, mobile phones and social media can magnify gender inequalities in many different ways. “Technology can magnify violence. Technologies enable sexual predators to target women more efficiently and, often, anonymously. It is harder to make the abusers accountable” she said.

But Ms. Corat also addressed the other side of the coin: “I want to focus on how we can take action to magnify the potential of technology to empower [women]”. She mentioned the different areas that need to coincide to tackle the digital divide: “We need to make sure that women are literate and educated. And we need to make sure that women participate in decision-making”.

Throughout her talk, Ms. Corat also gave examples of UNESCO’s work to overcome gender disparities and to magnify the potential of Technology on women’s empowerment, such as UNESCO’s initiative on women’s digital literacy in Pakistan, to comprehensive programmes on girls’ education in STEM areas.