Media Policy and Globalization - Blogs Unpad

162 MEDIA POLICY AND GLOBALIZATION
with less chances of job mobility, a continuation of the career trajectory
as witnessed by teachers at school and in science courses at universities
(Clegg 2001).
Gender-blind policies can worsen the situation of women, as they can
reinforce gender segregation by placing technologies and their control
away from women’s reach. In contrast, gender justice advocates that, if
policies are to correct power and resource imbalances, they have to depart
at the point of the most disadvantaged, in a bottom-up process, where the
definition of policy problems as well as the range of responses to these
problems is designed with the concept of accountability in mind. This is
not a formula for reifying local communities or taking for granted essential
qualities that define ‘women’s experience’ as Gurumurthy explains:
This cannot be left unarticulated or relegated as a task for ‘local communities’.
The policy process will have failed the goal of women’s
equality unless it consciously pushes for the expansion of choices
for women, for new spaces that promote women’s capacity, selfdetermination
and autonomy. Equal access needs thus to be understood
as a political notion – it means equal stakes in the gains from
technology for the most marginalized women, within a given cultural
context. (Gurumurthy 2005a)
Like other CSOs, gender justice advocates had limited influence in
shaping policy outcomes, beyond a disputed paragraph on women’s empowerment
and gender equality through access to ICTs in the Geneva
Declaration of Principles as well as in the Tunis Commitment and a pledge
to establish ‘gender-sensitive indicators’ for ‘ICT uses and needs’. These
limited gains have to be weighed against the insights from the regional
activities that will continue to draw from the priorities and experiences
of activists and researchers and their role in following up and monitoring
the implementation of WSIS priorities ( Jensen 2005). In between
the two summits, activists voiced concerns about differences in priorities
between CSOs in the North and South and the lack of community
or citizen participation in the WSIS deliberative process at the regional
meetings organized by the Gender Caucus (Mundkur and Kochar 2005).
In these ways, feminist advocates within the WSIS are the most consistent
advocates for the need to connect the narrow policy debates to
wider discussions about social and economic development and political
transformation. This strategy of broadening our understanding of
the politics of communication policy runs counter to the assumptions
by many Northern-based CSOs that argue that citizens, particularly
citizens in the developing world without civil society organizations in the
area of communication, require greater education and awareness about