Ensuring rights, equality and empowerment for all girls and women: Together, we shall win.
By Dr Jyotsna Jha
Director Skills, Commonwealth of Learning
“For ALL women and girls: Rights. Equality. Empowerment.” is the theme for celebrating International Women’s Day (IWD) on 8 March 2025. This year is significant as it marks the 30th anniversary of the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action when the United Nations started celebrating the IWD. The story of struggles and achievements towards women’s rights, equality and empowerment has largely been a story of two steps forward, one step back; we make progress in some areas and something else slips back in some part of the globe! New challenges emerge that reflect the same inequalities and similar obstacles, calling for renewed and sustained actions!
While tremendous progress has been made in the last ten years in terms of increased participation of girls at all stages of education, including the tertiary level, girls and women are still lagging behind in key emergent areas. For instance, women’s representation in courses and jobs related to artificial intelligence (AI) remains low. An analysis of data on nearly 1.6 million AI professionals worldwide revealed that “women comprised only 22 per cent of AI talent globally, with even lower representation at senior levels – occupying less than 14 per cent of senior executive roles in AI.”[1] It is not only AI; the gender gap persists in access to digital skills in general, especially in certain parts of the globe, such as Sub-Saharan Africa and the Asia Pacific regions.[2]
What is perhaps even more challenging is the increasing evidence of AI tools themselves being gender biased. Most of us have heard about Amazon’s scrapping of the AI hiring tool, which was biased against women.[3] Scholars have been writing about the ‘feminisation’ of digital space and how this is driving women and marginalised groups out of digital space. For instance, virtual assistants of big tech companies, despite having no body or biology, reinforce prevalent gender biases in their conception and how they have been trained to respond, signifying subordination and submission.[4] These are important aspects of ‘empowerment’ challenges for us to engage with and address in future.
We at the Commonwealth of Learning (COL) work with a mission ‘to help governments, institutions and organisations expand the scale, efficiency and quality of learning by using appropriate open, distance and technology-based approaches in the area of technology-supported learning’ and try to engage with these challenges. For instance, we are currently implementing a project on AI-powered gender-responsive capacity building for teachers in STEM in several countries where a sizable proportion of these teachers are women. We are also collaborating with the University of the South Pacific to develop AI-powered support tools specifically designed for IT support staff, primarily women, who manage online teaching platforms for large student cohorts.
What we need to celebrate is that this has NOT been a story of one step forward, two steps backwards. Despite setbacks, we have moved ahead and need to move further continuously. What has helped us in moving ahead has been our TOGETHERNESS. Togetherness in various forms and multiple ways. Over the years, governments, civil society organisations, and people’s movements have together shown their commitment to the cause of women’s rights and empowerment.
At COL, we want to express our commitment to the cause of women’s rights and empowerment through the means of ‘Together we thrive’, this year’s theme for the Commonwealth Day on 10 March. We are committed to actions for understanding inequalities and empowerment with all their nuances and to act together, striving for a world where everyone has an opportunity to flourish.
To watch the International Women’s Day 2025 Message from Dr Jyotsna Jha, Director: Skills COL and Dr Karen Nyangara, Adviser: Gender COL, view streaming below or click here: youtu.be/RdGNAaQIt70
[1] Interface (2024). AI’s Missing Link: The Gender Gap in the Talent Pool. www.interface-eu.org/publications/ai-gender-gap#:~:text=Our%20analysis%20of%20data%20on,senior%20....
[2] Coursera_Global_Skills_Report_2024.pdf
[3] Insight – Amazon scraps secret AI recruiting tool that showed bias against women | Reuters
[4] For instance, see Jennifer Jill Fellows and Lisa Smith (ed). 2022. Gender, sex and tech! An intersectional feminist guide, Women’s Press.
#InternationalWomensDay2025 #IWD2025 #GenderEquality #WomensEmpowerment #GirlsEducation #BeijingDeclaration30 #AIForAll #digitalinclusion
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Open Education Week: A COL video podcast series. Eps. 5 with Professor Lynne Bowker.
Open Education Week (OE Week) is an annual celebration and opportunity for those working in Open Education to actively share their achievements and learn about what others are achieving worldwide.
OE Week was launched in 2012 by Open Education Global as a collaborative, community-built open forum. Every year, OE Week raises awareness and highlights innovative open education successes worldwide and provides practitioners, educators, and students with an opportunity to build a greater understanding of open educational practices and be inspired by the wonderful work being developed by the community around the world.
From 3-7 March 2025, Dr Jako Olivier, Adviser: Higher Education at the Commonwealth of Learning (COL) @COL4D, will interview open education experts on various timely and topical subjects.
In Episode 5 of the COL video podcast series, Dr Olivier's topic is OER and Localisation with Professor Lynne Bowker, Canada Research Chair in Translation, Technologies and Society, Université Laval, Canada. Here, Professor Bowker emphasises the importance of localisation in OER, noting that adapting language and cultural references increases student engagement. She highlights AI-driven automatic translation as a promising tool for localisation but stresses that human intervention is necessary for cultural adaptation, accuracy, and relevance. Collaboration among faculty, language experts, and students is key to effective localisation, ensuring both linguistic and contextual appropriateness. She recommends using technology alongside human expertise, piloting OER with students for feedback, and fostering interdisciplinary teamwork to enhance the accessibility and impact of localised educational materials.
Watch the streaming video below or click here for the full interview: youtu.be/0Mza0vgbQGg
#COL4D #OpenEducationWeek #OER #openeducation #edtech #onlinelearning #educationforall #DigitalLearning #podcast #LifelongLearning #EdInnovation #highered #InclusiveEducation
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New Zealand launch of two major education reports
On 5 March 2025, New Zealand’s Wellington National Library hosted the National launch of the two most recent reports: one on Global Educational Leadership and the second on Technology in Pacific Education, jointly authored by the Commonwealth of Learning (COL) @COL4D.
Opening the event, supported by the New Zealand Ministry of Education and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade (MFAT) @MFATNZ, the Chair of the UNESCO National Commission, Liz Longworth, welcomed the Minister of Education, the Honourable Erica Stanford, to keynote the launch. Reflecting upon the recently released 2024/5 ‘GEM report: Leadership in education: lead for learning’, the Minister highlighted the essential role of school principals worldwide and the need to better support school leaders to be more effective in the New Zealand context. New Zealand Education Commissioner, Professor Gail Gillon, spoke to the challenges facing educators that the reports examined.
In speaking to the work of both reports, Manos Antoninis @ManosAntoninis, Director of the GEM Report UNESCO @GEMReport, outlined the findings, outcomes and recommendations of the two reports. In the Pacific, for instance, we note that geographic dispersion is a huge challenge for education engagement, but technology helps bridge gaps. Furthermore, technology has reduced connectivity costs, expanding learning, especially in higher education. In one example, the University of the South Pacific connects campuses via satellite, while social media and multimodal approaches enhance resilience. However, the digital impact remains uneven. While technology improves access and quality, it also requires much more investment in infrastructure, adaptation, and pedagogy.
In his closing remarks, Professor Peter Scott @peter_scott, President and CEO of COL, as joint publisher of the Pacific report, asked the audience to look at the significant steps that have been taken, supported by MFAT in concert with the wider family of all Pacific nations working together, “Critically reflecting on the impact of the work we do is vital to long-term success, so independent reporting from teams such as UNESCO Global Education Monitoring offers insights into what is working and what needs more attention”.
Professor Scott went on to say, “While chronic learning inequality is proving resistant to change, year-on-year, we can see in the Pacific report great potential for big impact and even for this work to be a model for others.”
Image Caption: (L-R: Professor Peter Scott, President and CEO of the Commonwealth of Learning; Manos Antoninis, Director of the Global Education Monitoring Report; Professor Gail Gillon, University of Canterbury and New Zealand Education Commissioner; Liz Longworth, Chair UNESCO New Zealand National Commission; and the Honourable Erica Stanford, Minister of Education, New Zealand).
#COL4D #MFATNZ #UNESCOGemReport #Education #OnlineLearning #NewZealand #HigherEducation #EdTech #LifelongLearning #DigitalEducation #OpenLearning #InnovationInEducation
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