2015 11 12 WS 271 Enhancing Gender Participation within IGFs Workshop Room 2 FINISHED

The following are the outputs of the real-time captioning taken during the Tenth Annual Meeting of the Internet Governance Forum (IGF) in João Pessoa, Brazil, from 10 to 13 November 2015. Although it is largely accurate, in some cases it may be incomplete or inaccurate due to inaudible passages or transcription errors. It is posted as an aid to understanding the proceedings at the event, but should not be treated as an authoritative record. 

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>> MARILYN CADE: Hi, folks. We're going to get started. Let me ask our support team, can we go ahead and start the recording so we can go ahead and open the meeting. Thank you. I think that means yes.

>> NATHALIA SAUTCHUK PATRICIO: Welcome, everybody. Before I make my comments, I will open to everyone -- maybe presentations about yourselves, the women here. Okay.

>> MARILYN CADE: Would you like me to start?

>> NATHALIA SAUTCHUK PATRICIO: Yes.

>> MARILYN CADE: Let me start. I'll try to spend 30 seconds to tell you who I am and ask you to do the same thing. My name is Marilyn Cade. I am one of the co-moderators this morning. I am also a board member of an organization called WAVE, the Women's Alliance for Virtual Exchange, which focuses on bringing access to women for social, cultural, and economic development and inclusion. It's a new organization. It has participated at the IGF both in Baku, where women came together from the Arab region to decide to undertake this, and also it has continued to participate. It participated last year at the IGF, and I'm very pleased to have the opportunity to join Nathalia in co-moderating this session. I've been around a long time in the Internet governance space. I participated in both faces of the world Summit on the Information Society. I actually helped to find ICANN to bring the private sector to cooperate in the consultation in 1988, and I am the chief catalyst of ICANN USGA, which I founded in 1999 when we had our first national IGF. I'm on the IGF appointed by the UN Secretary General, and after that, I have run out of things to talk about. It's great to be here.

>> JANE COFFIN: Thank you very much. My name is Jane Coffin. I work with the Internet Society. I'm a Director of Development Strategy. What that basically means is I work with many people around the world, emerging markets in developing countries to help facilitate the development of infrastructure, community development, and capacity building. I've lived and worked in developing countries before this, worked for government, business, and I'm just very happy to be here.

>> DAFNE SABANES PLOU: Yes. I'm Dafne Sabanes Plou from Association for Progressive Communications. I work in the women's program and am the coordinator for Latin America and the Caribbean, and the work has to do with lots of things related to Internet policies and also training women on ICT issues and also on Internet rights and working closely with the women's movement so they put Internet rights in their agenda.

>> MARY LYNNE NIELSON: Good afternoon, everyone. My name is Mary Lynne Nielson, and I'm with the IEEE. That's the largest technology membership association in the world. In particular, I am their global operations and outreach program director for their standards association. My job is to work with technology policy, with international affairs, and also with new and emerging technologies and on the points of convergence blend and opportunity between those three rather divergent topics.

>> SELENNE KUSCICH: Good afternoon. My name is Selenne Kuscich. I'm political scientist. I work at Cisco in the corporate compliance portfolio. I do deal with technical violations, surprisingly, and also deal with international affairs portfolio, some policy matters. I'm glad to be here to share my experience. Thank you.

>> MARILYN CADE: We're going on around the whole table, so just your name. You don't want to tell us who you are? Okay. Would you just tell us -- maybe the next person will tell us who you are.

>> VANESSA ISSAH: My name is Vanessa Issah, and I'm from Ghana. I'm with the Ghana Internet Registry.

>> ZOYA REHMAN: My name is Zoya Rehman, and I'm from Bytes for All, Pakistan, which is a digital rights organization.

>> ADNAN CHAUDHRI: My name is Adnan Chaudhri. I'm from Digital Rights Foundation, which is a Pakistani rights organization as well.

>> AUDIENCE: Hi. I'm (Inaudible) at University of Gothenburg in Sweden.

>> RAFAEL PRINCE: Rafael Prince, Brazilian Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

>> BARBARA MASTERS: Barbara Masters, I'm with Human Rights in China.

>> JOVANNA: I'm Jovanna. I'm an international student, and I'm from here, from Joao Pessoa.

>> MARIANA: My name is my name is Mariana, and I'm from Joao Pessoa too.

>> MATEUS: My name is Mateus, and I'm from Brazil. I participate in the youth program and I'm very happy to be here.

>> BEN CREET: Hello. My name is Ben Creet, and I'm from InternetNZ. We're the ccTLD holder and we organize New Zealand's IGF.

>> MARIAN GORDON: My name is Marian Gordon, and I'm from the United States, and I work at the State Department. Thank you.

>> EVELYN NAMARA: My name is Evelyn Namara. I'm from Uganda.

>> MARILYN CADE: We're going to give you a chance to introduce yourselves. We're going to go ahead with the program and will ask you to introduce yourself later.

So I want to say a few words about what brought us together here for this workshop by starting out and telling you how fantastic it is that you're here with us, and I am -- I'd like to call your attention to a fact you've already observed, and it's sort of a joke, and -- but I'm going to tell it. I was just at the UN for the stakeholder consultation on WSIS+10 recently, and the panel was moderated by Doreen Bogdan, a very senior officer woman from the ITU, and the four women experts who were speaking were all women, and Doreen made the introduction and said, And as you may have noticed, all of the panelists, who are all experts in their field, happen to be women, and I said, Yeah, we're making up for lost time. Come on. You're supposed to laugh.

(Laughter)

>> We're nodding our heads in agreement.

(Laughter)

>> MARILYN CADE: So the way we're going to run the next 90 minutes is going to be in the spirit of looking at things, even if they're tough things, we're going to look positively and productively and continue to speak about what we can do to affect change. What I want to do right now is start with a few facts, and what key did in putting this workshop together -- and I was not involved in putting the workshop together. I'm very pleased to have been brought in to help co-moderate, Nathalia and a colleague proposed a workshop that was about measuring gender participation in the IGF itself, and totally unrelated, WAVE, the group I'm on the board of, proposed a workshop on measuring gender participation at the national and regional IGFs, and the MAG I am on proposed these two workshops be merged. We're going to be looking at the entirety of the Internet Governance Forum ecosystem, which today includes the IGF you're at, which is the global IGF that is affiliated with the UN, and then the organically developed IGFs that have grown up around the world, and I'm going to cheat by handing out a document that has a map on the second page, which will show you there are now 13 national and regional IGFs. They are regional and subregional IGFs.

In Africa, there are several -- five to six to eight countries that make up a subregion. Europe also has a subregional IGF. In -- then there are over 30 national IGFs, and there are four youth IGFs, all that are very dynamic and have grown up in a self-generated manner.

So we're going to look at what the gender participation has been, and we're going to start out by looking at -- I come from the private sector, and I used to be the vice president of Internet and eCommerce for AT&T Computer Systems, and I learned a long time ago that facts are our friends because if we can't count and we can't measure, we can't tell what progress we're making.

So we're going to look at these facts for just a few minutes. Before we do that, I want to go back to you, Nathalia, because I think you have a few more points you wanted to make, yes?

>> NATHALIA SAUTCHUK PATRICIO. Okay. To start this session, I'd like to tell you why I would like to propose this workshop at the IGF. I'm Nathalia. I'm in computer engineering, and I am 30 years old. When I was at universities studying computer engineering, there was only two women, me and another colleague, in the class. The class had 40 students, 38 are male.

I always think why it is happening, why women are not interested in computer engineering and technology.

When I become more involved with the Internet Governance environment, I think of a similar scenario and think about it, where are the women in the Internet Governance, why they don't appear, and because -- because of that, I proposed this workshop to let voice for stronger women inspire the new generations of women to get involved with the Internet issues and engineering as well.

So I will pass to Marilyn Cade to present some data about the women participation, the national and regional IGFs to begin this discussion.

>> MARILYN CADE: Thank you. So one of the other hats that I wear as a MAG member is I act as the coordinator of the national and regional IGFs to plan what we call the substantive session, a dialogue between the national and regional IGFs, and this year we undertook a survey of certain characteristics, and I was already going to do this, but I was especially motivated when I looked at some of the workshop topics to be sure that we looked at gender, so we're going to look at a subpart very, very quickly of the results of the survey.

So we have -- I mentioned the number, but let me say it again. We have 13 regional and subregional IGFs and 30 national IGFs plus the four youth. The four youth IGFs did not respond to the survey. It was voluntary on who responded.

25 of the total number of our initiatives responded.

The -- and I'm just showing you, first of all, we have a requirement to be a national or regional IGF, you have to track stakeholder makeup, so this chart, which shows that 87% of the respondents say they track stakeholder makeup, and it is a requirement for them, the interesting thing is the 13 are actually confusing answers, so we're not sure that no was the answer, but we no affirmatively 87, yes, we got it, we know we're supposed to do it, we did it.

Now, they're not required to -- sorry. They're not required to track -- they're not required to track -- I'm sorry. I'm trying to figure out where I am here. They're not required to track women in the organizational structure. I can't read that far. Women in the organizational structure, nor youth, nor persons with disability, but we asked the question in the survey, Do you track that, and the interesting thing -- so there's the organizing of the event and then there's who attends the event, right, so this is the leadership structure -- hi, Anja, welcome.

This is the leadership structure of the national and IGF survey, and 65% of them say they have women in the organizational structure, meaning in the leadership structure, and 52% have youth in the organizational structure. Only 17% identify that they have a person with disabilities in the leadership structure. Remember, again, this is voluntary tracking on this part.

So the next chart that you're looking at tells you what the participation was, not the organizing, but the participation, and 74% track the stakeholder group participation while 26% do not, the actual participation. 65% track gender and youth, 35% do not, and 39% do identify persons with disabilities in their attendance.

So I thought that was really interesting that even though it's not mandated, we are beginning to track the stakeholder -- sorry -- the gender attendance; however, I want to share a problem we encountered. We're not counting consistently or the same thing. As an illustration, I will share with you that one of the regional IGFs reported that yes, they track gender, and then they showed me the chart. They have 535 attendees, 37% are female, 50-some-percent are male, and 9% are doctors, so apparently we have a new gender being introduced.

(Laughter)

I love to know that these folks are doctors, but I'd like to know how many were men and how many were women, so I give that to you as an illustration that as we talk about gender participation and both leadership and in participation, we have to be sure that we're asking the same question and we're all counting in the same way, and if we say what we want is gender parity, a growth in gender participation and balance, then we really have to -- we have to think about how we're going to gather those statistics.

I think we should maybe stop and start with some of our comments from our panelists, and I want to welcome Anja, and just ask you briefly, would you just introduce who you are to folks?

>> ANJA KOVACS: Thank you. I'm very sorry for being late. I was on the session of net neutrality that was supposed to finish at 4:00. My name is Anja Kovacs. I work with the Internet Democracy Program in India. We have free speech democracy and social justice and some of our work looks at gender issues as well, though not everything. Thank you.

>> MARILYN CADE: I'm going start with Jane because she has a limited time with us. I want to introduce Jane. I've asked people to speak from -- in some cases the speakers are going to speak from a personal perspective, and I'm going to throw out some questions to them as we go along. The questions are not mandatory, but some of the speakers have prepared comments they want to make. The interesting thing is this section is not about all of the issues related to gender participation, it is really about measurement, and so we won't get to all of the topics that some of you are particularly interested in, but when we get to the open mic, we'd like to hear about the other issues that you're most concerned and interested in so we can reflect that back.

But I want to ask Jane -- Jane has had a very interesting experience and career, which I've tracked very closely, and I'm going to ask you to tell -- her to tell you a little bit about it and about her views in gender, engagement, participation, and change in some aspects of that. Thank you, Jane.

>> JANE COFFIN: Thank you, Marilyn. I'll be brief because I'm running off to another meeting, and hopefully it will set the stage for some other discussion.

I used to work in a landlocked country in the former Soviet Republic, and we were helping to build regulatory strengthening and an institution there and of course communications infrastructures. I made the mistake of -- I learned later that I made the mistake of suggesting that a very capable economist, a woman -- I didn't think of her as anything other than an economist, but it happened to be a female person -- go on a trip to the U.S. to learn about what was going on in other regulatory bodies and how they were structured and to get more experience.

I was told by her that I should not support her because other people, some of the men on the regulatory body, which was very closely balanced as far as the participation of female/male in that body, wouldn't want her to go because they wanted to go upon the trip.

So it's not that I'm trying to single out men and women, but obviously we're here to talk about gender, but I was very surprised by this because in that country, which is a former communist country, there was a very strong balance of women engineers and women working in that space, so I was surprised that this woman I'd known who had been a great participant in the work we were doing was asking me to not help her get more capacity and more training because she would be singled out and actually probably punished internally, not hurt, but it would be impacted.

The last thing I'll say before I leave is that I work for the Internet Society. We're trying to do more to create opportunities for engagement for all people and including, of course, increasing participation for women in different fora, and the way we do that is we bring our organization to the ground through a regional -- through our regional teams and also through our regional chapters. Those chapters are mechanisms and ways that people can participate and help motivate the gender issue should they want to. So that's something that at the very grass-roots' level can you do on your own with our chapters. Our chapters are open to anyone.

Also, with our regional teams, we're very open to suggestions from people as we help support national and regional IGFs. We've been trying to create a stronger platform across the world for the IGF spirit and the different work that goes on by supporting those organizations, both financially and substantively with our experts.

Some other quick examples, we help support a group call AfChix in Africa. This was a grass-roots group created by women engineers, many from countries with a religious affiliation. They were uncomfortable being in just with rooms getting training, so they self-organized and created a women's engineering group that's specific to that region and specific to that group, but that's something we do do, and so if there's a self-formulation in another region for a specific purpose, we are happy to help try and support those groups.

We also help support coming called Grace Hoper, and I think our colleague from IEEE can talk more about that, which supports women engineers and women in technical experts in fora. I'm not an expert to speak about that. The fellowships we do give and ambassadors, we will send out emails to our chapters and people who are part of ISOC, you can join free, to let you know that we have different opportunities and they're technical opportunities for the Internet Engineering Task Force, there are policy opportunities at the IETF for government officials and other interested parties, and also to events like this, so we do provide different scholarships because we know that access is very important, and it's personal access to an event to meet other people so you can multiply the networks of humans.

Okay. I'm going to run off.

>> MARY LYNNE NIELSON: Can I add? You're piloting with IEEE, a fellows program to specifically move folks into the technical communities that are developing ICT industry standards. We have people at 802 developing all the wireless communication, finding how that operates this week.

>> MARILYN CADE: Jane, thank you, and thank you for coming, and changing your schedule so you could be with us. One of the things that we will do for all of you is ask you if you're interested in hearing further from some of the speakers. If you will give -- if I might do this -- make this offer. If you would give a business card or contact to Nathalia, we'll make sure that we share that information with the speakers who are here because I think you may hear about resources that may sound interesting that you may want to follow up with.

I'm going to turn to some of the other speakers, and the first -- let me, first of all, just offer the opportunity to the speakers to take a couple of minutes or three minutes and make a statement similar to what Jane did. If there's a particular direction that you want to go to, and I don't know, Dafne, if you want to kick that off.

>> DAFNE SABANES PLOU. Well, it's interesting to start also with statistics because in the women's rights program we started in 2012 as part of the Gender Dynamic Coalition within IGF, what we call the gender report card, and we ask every organizer of a panel to fill in this gender report card and tell us about the gender balance in each of the workshops and sessions that are taking place here in IGF, so it's -- all the results are published in the Gender Dynamic Coalition site within the IGF site, but I think it's interesting to start to look at what's been happening during all these years, and we also decided to have agenda report card this year for the regional IGFs, so we did it in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, and we find some interesting trends, and I could say that we looked at the number of male moderators and female moderators of panels, the number of panelists also, and the workshops most -- where we have more women panelists or more women moderators, and which other interests -- we would say the expertise of women who are invited to be in charge of those panels, so I just -- just small numbers, but just to start our discussion, last year, out of 89 workshops, 67 of them were moderated by men and the rest by women, and then 60% of the panelists in all these workshops were men. Also, we see that there is a strong presence of men as those who have an opinion, those who are the expertise, those who are lead.

But then it's interesting also to see that on the subtheme of Internet and Human Rights, there's almost a parity of women and men panelists, so, you know, I would say that there perhaps is where the issues that include women more in the discussion are targeted, no, and discussed.

So -- and then following that, we also have the workshops that have to do with emerging Internet for growing and advancement and enhancing digital trust. Last year this was the most followed by all attendance to the IGF, and we could see that there was also quite a balance between male panelists and women panelists there.

Now, the theme, the subtheme that has less women is emerging issues, you know -- yeah, we will say that panelists there were a ratio of four male to one female panelist, no, so -- but that gives us also an idea of where we are and what's -- where women get involved and from where, no, so I think it's very interesting that we start analyzing that and looking at perhaps we don't have so many women engineers, but for instance, many sociologists, many lawyers, you know, who are coming into the Internet rights field and doing the contribution there, so I think it's very interesting to look at those figures and be able to analyze them.

I can talk afterwards of the regional IGFs or you want me to talk now?

>> MARILYN CADE: Why don't you go ahead and do the regionals now.

>> DAFNE SABANES PLOU: So in the regional IGFs, it was the first time we did it, and it was interesting that we wanted to know about the extent of women's participation here, and we were able to collect information from 42 sessions in all these three regions, and -- with an average to 300 attendees to each session or workshop, and so we see also that woman in these three IGFs were less than half of the participants in general. We have those figures. But then we see also that women are not invited as moderators. Almost -- you know, almost all men in the three regions were the moderators and no place for women there. But they were invited, yes, to -- as panelists, no, but in a smaller proportion. I will say that we didn't have the ratio that we had at a global level.

So we see that still there's a lot to do at regional levels, no, and especially to get women there and then to have -- to work towards having more equity in the participation in the different panels, but still we can say that gender issues were mentioned by participants and panelists in some of the sessions, and in Latin America, out of eight sessions that we had, because we only had sessions, we didn't work to workshops, in four of them the issues came up, and it was interesting because in ABC Women's Rights Program, decided to have Internet Governance workshops before the regional IGFs for women specifically so that we could discuss the big issues with our perspective and see what were the problems there, and those women were invited to stay for the IGFs, so I think that made a difference in a way comparing to years before because women were now informed and they had been discussing the issues before and they were able to participate from the floor, you know, and speak up and tell everybody what they were thinking about the issue being discussed.

So -- we even had a woman who -- you know, very -- she was very proud of her indigenous language, and so she decided to speak in her own language and make a question in her own language saying, okay, you have everything in Spanish here for Latin America, and what about my mother tongue, what is there I can find on my own language?

But still, we see that there's a lot to do at the regional level, and that's why we think that it's very important perhaps to go on having these pre-meetings with women so that they can engage more actively in the discussions. Thank you.

>> NATHALIA SAUTCHUK PATRICIO: Great data. Thank you, Dafne, for speaking. And now I --

>> MARILYN CADE: Want to turn to Anja?

>> ANJA KOVACS: Could I ask Dafne a question first? It's a clarification question.

>> MARILYN CADE: It's always the speaker's prerogative.

(Laughter)

>> ANJA KOVACS: Because what I'm wondering is if you found that there were almost no women moderators at a regional level but at the global level it was okay, I'm just wondering does that mean that -- do women who are part of panels or moderate panels at least at the global level overwhelming come from the parts of the world that did you not survey, which is New York, Western Europe, the developed countries? Do you have any data on that?

>> DAFNE SABANES PLOU: No. We were looking at the panelists in the global IGFs. For instance, in Latin America, as women, we were quite -- you know, we were not comfortable seeing only men moderating the panel, and the fact is that women do participate in the organization of the whole thing, no, and in Latin America, what they have is an open consultation to everybody who wants to participate in it regarding the things that are going to be discussed during the regional IGF, and lots of women participate there, so it's really hard to see that are you not there just because of perhaps some bias or whatever, you know, or some power thing, and so I believe that we still have to be able to talk about it with our colleague, our male colleagues, no, and say, Okay, what's going on, and let's go for equity or parity here too.

>> ANJA KOVACS: Thank you. I don't have quite as concrete data or figures to share, it's more based on personal experience. Many years ago I was part of the executive committee of a European students' organization that was a union of -- National Union of Students in Europe, and in that organization, gender of concern was something that was really central to how it was organized, and very often in Internet governance I've thought that actually we need similar work to bring this to the fore much more centrally. The first thing I had to thing when Dafne was talking is I live in India now and have been part of several Asia-Pacific IGFs, and from the very beginning, not just actually as part of the IGF but even some of the Civil Society email lists, the tone of international governance was different than I was used to. The culture was set in a different way, and the way people spoke to each other, in the beginning I thought it was enormously rude.

It was really something to get used to, and to understand that this is a culture, there are codes, you don't necessarily have to take offense so easily, et cetera.

I didn't find it appealing, though, and I must admit when people start to speak like that, I still don't find it appealing. That hasn't really changed.

Specifically about the Asia-Pacific IGF, I also realized there was a specific discourse because the people who first started it were mostly part of the technical community. That's nothing good or bad, it's just that because it's fairly small, very committed group of volunteers who spend an awful lot of time, they are doing their thing in their way, and for quite a few years, I think it didn't open up enough, it's not as if there wasn't any goodwill, but there really was to some extent this cultural barrier, and I think the Internet governance institute on gender helped, but also we asked quite a lot of people to -- from the technical community to attend rights Com which was an Internet conference and organized by Access Now, which was in manila this year and which is more the playground of Civil Society, so to say.

So it's our culture that governs there, and I think it is really interesting -- for them as well, a really interesting encounter and getting rid of participation from the Civil Society and the APR IGF was part of the agenda at Rights Com, and I do think people are thinking the IGF is changing, but it took conscious efforts to people who wanted to collaborate but felt it needed to be done in a more -- that some issues needed to be addressed more directly, head-on, so to say.

A few other things that I just had to think of is also about the agenda setting and what we discuss at the IGF. I find that very often the more gender issues are either in separate workshops or not there at all, and what a colleague and me did this year, we organized the workshop on the issue of consent, and we're both part of a feminist organization. Consent for us is at the heart of almost all the work that we do because it is so central to feminist thinking and practice, but what we did in that workshop was basically bring the concept of concept as it relates to sexual expression all the way making links to the importance of consent when it comes to the social contract between citizens and the state and the digital age and asking questions about have we really given our consent to the social contract the way it is now.

What I thought was really interesting was by using a concept like that, we really had a cross-pollination of views and perspectives and people where there were very strong feminist voices in the room, there were very strong data protection voices in the room, including from government agencies that did data protection, and I don't think they had had that kind of discussion on consent before, so we ended up covering technology, ethics, morality, law, a whole range of issues.

I think that's also really important. It is not just about adding women only, rights, it's also about shifting those debates and thinking about what are the ways in which we can do that.

And finally -- well, two more points. One quickly. Something I learned from my years in that student organization was that if you really look for them, you always find good women, but the system in that organization was such that if you did not fill the quota with women, you couldn't move forward, and there were women who weren't at all appreciative of the way gender was pushed in that organization until they found out three years later that the reason they were given the chance to lead that particular workshop or do this particular thing that got them elected to the post they wanted was because we really had to look for another woman.

When you look for them, you find them. There's plenty of us.

And finally, I did ask that question already about diversity. This is something I'm concerned about still in the global IGF. I appreciate there are many initiatives to bring women from the global south to the IGF. APC does important work, DIPLO, ISOC, but I think it would be valuable if there was a central part that is -- maybe the MAG, the Secretariat itself, so that people can come independently, and you do not need to have already access to a particular network, which also means that you need to have a particular allegiance. I think if we really want to open this up, we need something like that as well. Thank you.

>> NATHALIA SAUTCHUK PATRICIO: Thank you, Anja, for your comments. Now I will pass the floor to Selenne.

>> SELENNE KUSCICH: Thank you, Anja. Very impressive.

For me it's a little bit complex. I come from political theory. I tend to go -- to make more complex my reasoning.

Briefly, I came into the field starting in government. I work in the regulator before working in Alcatel, and then I start working -- started working in Cisco 13 years ago. I could say that this field is not easy for women, and it isn't easy for social scientists either, so for those that are in the social sciences, get ready, for those young people, for those young ladies, get ready for that.

So anyway, I think that we are doing good things in IGF. Women are doing very well. Mary Ann and all of us -- well, I'm new at this. All of women are doing very well. We are transcending as the -- we are a level 18. We are doing things in the world. We are transforming, and that is a very good thing.

I'm still concerned, very concerned. There is some confrontation, and it's natural among women and men. Men still want their absolute, they want to be stay in what they have been for always. They want to be -- they don't want to be threatened, but I think they have to be accustomed that we can do things, we can elaborate as much as they can, and that we are their peers, and I think we have to be more human, all. We, as women, have to be a little bit less prudent, we have to be less covert, we have to go for it, and we have to understand that -- we have to understand men, that they fear that they do not understand us and they have to understand us that we do not remain -- that we want to have our liberty and go for it, so I think that we need to cooperate as well as a nation is to cooperate as well, so we need more diplomacy and we need more humanity, and frankly speaking, I think IGF is doing a very well job, and anything that we can do, anything like that what is in forums, I don't really -- let I don't really go for quotas, but let's go for quotas. We don't work for any voluntary system, we work for what we can do. So this is all what I can say. History will tell if conflicts will reduce. There is nothing biological, nothing physiological among women and men, not to be the same thing. Thank you very much.

>> NATHALIA SAUTCHUK PATRICIO: Thank you, Selenne. Now I will pass the voice to Mary.

>> MARY LYNNE NIELSON: I think I'm going to follow Jane's example. I'm going to start with a story, and maybe I'll end with a story. I went to a training class. They're trying to teach you, they're giving you techniques and leadership tools and all of this, and of course, they love to do these exercises and games, so we had a game, and the game was they split us into teams and we're on a plane and it was in Alaska in the United States. The plane went down. It's the tundra. It's cold, you're frozen. You can only take certain number of things from the plane and you have to get from where you crashed to this place. What do you take? How do you go?

We're in teams, and one team is all men. Oh, yeah, we're going to make it, we're going to get there, we're going to achieve.

Guess who died first?

(Laughter)

I'm from the IEEE, so when we approach Internet governance and our first tactic towards it has really been to look at that Internet aspect, that engineering part of what we're all examining here, those technical roles that we play, and when you look at the role of women in engineering, it is challenging. It's not getting better, it's getting worse.

If you look at your statistics out there today, you're going to see that the amount of women going into the STEM field, science, technology, engineering, and math, are decreasing, and this is despite consistent and concerted efforts, true pushes to bring more women in. That's a challenge. I would actually wonder as a statistics for IGF to look at where are the women coming from? Are they coming from the poli sci side, are they coming from the policymaking field, regulatory, government, or are they coming from technology? Where are they? Where's that balance out? That's a point to look at. Now within the IEEE we've actually created a program. We call it Women in Engineering. It's one of the societies. It has 15,000 members right now. That sounds fantastic, doesn't it? There are 430,000 members in the IEEE think about that.

Now, not every woman joins, not every woman chooses to take advantage of that. That is, of course, her prerogative; however, the number is low, and it does make you wonder where are they?

And then you go out and you look at it. It's not just getting a woman into the field, but it's also keeping her in the field. This is an enormous challenge in technology. Many women enter this field, start working, and are so intimidated, put off, annoyed, frustrated, or a combination of all of them that they give up the field.

So we are approaching this in a number of ways at the IEEE. We've built this community to engage the women, we are reaching out, we are having conferences and sessions that are meant to drive this subject and to be driven by women, to encourage them, and to build that sense of sisterhood because what the studies are showing are if you make a woman feel like she is there as part of the norm and not the exception, then she will continue her participation, she will continue her involvement, and she will indeed grow as a leader. And that is a very important thing to achieve.

So we started programs also for youth. There's that old expression of the Jess wits of give us the boy until he is seven and we will have him for life, well, give us the girl until she has a degree, and we'll probably have her for life too. What we want to do is build the diversity in the women to have them engage, so we have training for them, we have something called the STAR program to encourage young technologists, we have something before they get to university, is this something for me, what do I like, what don't I like, how can I engage because their mission is to have the global engagement of advancement of women in technical disciplines, and there's a word there that is magical to me, and that word is "inspiration," because it is not enough to engage a woman, it is not enough potentially to advance a woman, but how do you inspire her? Because if you build the fire in a woman and build that sense of belonging, of engagement, of attachment, she will become something utterly marvelous because that potential lies there.

So we have that mission. We take it, we do it. There are magazines, conferences, there are challenges for women and contests and awards for them to get them to move forward, so we are, believe it or not, the largest international professional organization to -- dedicated to promoting women engineering and scientists. We can actually say that.

So while in some ways those statistics are rather scary, on the other side, they're rather encouraging. There is that potential, there is that hope, there is that growth. I'm going to pull back for my other thought when I go to my story because I think it might lead us to a little bit of our discussion.

I was once at an event years ago that will remain nameless, and they were tracking of course their female versus male attendees and they were saying how wonderful it was that they had so many female attendees. Well, yours truly was in the room, and I was going, Hello, I'm feeling rather lonely here, where are these? Where are these women? Have you ever been at a big conference where they have a huge display for and they hire a lot of young ladies that wear very, very short dresses and very, very high heels to try to get the men to come into the booths?

They were counting them.

So the point I want to drive at is, yes, numbers are very important to track, but it is what you do with the numbers and it is how you interpret those numbers and par lay those numbers that are extremely valuable, and the concept of gathering the leadership roles for the women are extremely important, and I think that direction for IGF is crucial. The moderators, the panelists, the suggesters, the drivers is extremely important to pursue, and that need to push it down becomes paramount to have because if a woman is simply there to bring your numbers up, you may discourage her.

You need to make her feel that she is not a statistical balance but rather a necessity.

And so finding ways to engage women and to bring that perspective in is absolutely valuable to do and to do it in a way that is encouraging and supportive.

How many of you heard that story about the actress Jennifer Lawrence recently? Anybody hear this story? Okay. Jennifer Lawrence, right? Might have seen her in a movie, maybe? Big star, brings in millions of dollars to the movies. You're getting the image, right? Has said how challenging it is for her to be in sessions because when she talks strongly and forcefully, she is seen as being aggressive, as being pushy, as being confrontational, but if men are in the room and talk the same way, they are considered to be forceful and strong and an advocate.

So what you want to do is make it not just that you have women at the table and not that you have women treated as leaders but that you have the ability for women to put forward their opinions comfortably, strongly, forcefully, and not be considered negative and confrontation, and I certainly hope I haven't been the latter in what I've expressed to you right now.

(Applause)

>> MARILYN CADE: So let's move to another part of our discussion. Before we do that, I think it's worth our just noting something that Anja and I are aware of and Mary and Gordon and some others here are, but it's not as visible as it needs to be, and that is that recently at the United Nations, a significant commitment has taken place in the sustainable development goals with the establishment of a goal, Goal 5, that is focused on gender equality and inclusiveness, and, you know, we are just at the beginning of understanding how the sustainable development goals will begin to be rolled out and recognized both in the Intergovernmental Organizations like UNESCO, the ITU, UNDP, but also at the national level where governments are asked in their national broadband plans and in other plans that they make and share to incorporate how they're going -- and describe how they are going to contribute to achieving the sustainable (Portion of audio lost due to Internet disruption)

>> -- definitely women, but I want to add marginalized communities as a whole.

>> MARY LYNNE NIELSON: And I think that the perspective that you're looking at is it gives you multiplicity of viewpoints, it gives you varied opinions, it gives you a perspective that you may not have considered. There's the old joke about, you know, what was the difference with Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, she did everything he did except backwards and in high heels. How many times have you read about a woman and look at developing economies where women have simply had to adapt to find a way to function where they're not allowed to work and yet their husband dies and they have to feed their families and they figure it out. That's the kind of ingenuity women brings, and it's not just the perspective, the world viewpoint, life viewpoint they bring to life as a value.

>> MARILYN CADE: I'm going to take us back to the purpose of this workshop. Did you want to say something?

>> PANELIST: Yes, short thing. I believe that -- I'm not sure. I'm not sure if -- those cultures are a different thing, and I'm sure whether --

>> MARILYN CADE: Let me say something first of all. Some are new to the IGF, we have a code of conduct at the IGF, that is we respect all views and we listen to all views. We're not required to agree with all views, but we really are within the IGF required to be as -- the former Secretary General, the deputy Secretary General of the UN who was our first advisor to the UN on the IGF, and when we first founded the IGF, we were sometimes pretty acrimonious with each other in the way we expressed our disagreement, and as was always said to us, you can disagree but you don't have to be disagreeable in how you do it.

>> PANELIST: No, no.

>> MARILYN CADE: And so I think it's fair to say in our code of conduct within our actions in the IGF, we don't have to agree with every other person's point of view or every other culture's approach.

>> PANELIST: No. What I was going to say is exactly what you say is I'm not sure if we can say something about those cultures, those cultures are very different. I don't think we have the right. That's it. And furthermore, I don't think in our own culture we, as women, are that far liberated.

>> MARILYN CADE: I'm going to go to you and ask another question, because we are going to stay on the topic of the workshop, but I said we would also identify some of these other issues, so let me go to you.

>> ANJA KOVACS: I'm sorry for coming in again. I just felt I should because I live in a country where the participation of women in the workforce goes down as they become more educated, right, so, I mean, I can see the issue in that sense. The thing is, like, I'm just wondering, like, what is the purpose of this meeting then because who is it that you need to have that conversation or that argument with? I think there are plenty of women who could do far more in the IGF, but they already have an interest. They are likely already connected in one way or the other, and the way you address those is different from women who have no interest in participation in public life or seemingly no interest in participation outside of their home at all, so I think we have to be kind of clear. I think a point that it works differently for different cultures, but I think for women who already come to these events or have already expressed an interest, I'm not so sure it's all that different because, exactly like you're saying, it's not even in Europe or the U.S., it's not as if, like, women's empowerment has reached its end, right, and if I look at India, despite its horrible track record on gender issues, one of the most powerful women who've inspired me most and how you deal with power structures also come from there, so it is a more mixed message, and I think we should think about who is it exactly we're talking to.

>> MARILYN CADE: We're here with a real narrow mandate on this particular workshop, but I think that we will be capturing some of the topics that are coming up, and certainly, I was not able to attend the Dynamic Coalition on Gender, but it is a place that's doing a great deal of work and maybe I'll come back to you, Dafne, a little bit later to say something about that, but I want to go back to the purpose of this workshop because I'd like to think about whether we are making -- we don't make recommendations at the IGF, but we certainly could have good ideas that we can promote and put forward, and yesterday in the substantive discussion of the dialogue with the national and regional IGFs, we talked about, as I said to you all when we opened, in order to be listed as a national or regional IGF, the report that is provided, it's a mandatory report, they must track stakeholder participation. They're not today required to track gender, but one of the things that came out of the discussion of the workshop yesterday was the idea that gender tracking ought to be added, and we're talking about both tracking of male/female participation in the organizational structures and also in the participation and reporting, not commenting, not judging, reporting, reflecting the fact that there are facts that can be useful.

One of the things that was particularly interesting to me that -- it is that one of the newest national IGFs, Zimbabwe, requires 50/50 percent of male/female on their leadership structure. It is mandated, and there's a couple of others who do it as well, so I'm -- you know, so here's my question. You know, what's your thinking about goals in the number of participants -- sorry, the number of -- yeah, the number of participants in -- or gender diversity in panels? What are your thoughts about the idea of goals, mandates being it's prescribed and it's 50/50. No, I'm talking about goals.

What are your feelings about goals in improving the gender balance? I'm going to go to the audience first and then to the panelists. Anybody have a view? Olga, yes.

>> OLGA: Thank you Marilyn, one goal would be to have a balance in the panels. I've been saying this several times. One goal would be to have balance in the leadership position of ISTAR organizations, which are relevant in this space. It is -- it takes, like, two minutes if you review the board composition of all the ISTARs, RARs, one -- some have zero women, and I'm sure that you would agree with me that there are many well-prepared women that can -- I'm an engineer. There are other engineers and other careers among us, that we could perfectly be suitable for those positions, so that goal would be -- and I would like to take what Selenne said about quotas. I think that we could ask them to have some gender balance quotas in their board. Not only two or three women, as, as you said, we bring the gender balance, as one woman has a picture there, but have some desired balance, starting with the quotas. Some of these organizations have zero women, zero, ever, ever, ever, zero women in their boards, and they are very relevant, especially, for example, for Latin America.

>> MARILYN CADE: Yes, please. And before you speak, I should disclose that I'm a member of InternetNZ.

>> BEN CREET: Oh, really? Thank you. We organize the National IGF for New Zealand, and it's called NetHui, and we have for a couple of years had a policy of 50/50 women on our panels. This year all of our keynote speakers were women. We we're facilitators because not all of our positions are panel-based. We try and keep them, but we coordinate communities and make sure they try and work together. Certainly, one of the other things we've done, which I believe in a lot because we are -- we're a civil organization, but -- Civil Society organization, but we're a technical community charity, so we have quite a few opinionated gray-haired men, as we instituted this year a really strong code of conduct, and we had people in every session making sure that there was a -- they could speak in conversation, and if they had -- I was one of those people, so if you had two or three men starting to have a back-and-forth conversation, we just jumped in as mic runners and stopped them getting the microphone, and made sure the next person who wanted to speak was a woman. Small, simple stuff, but it kind of helped.

>> PANELIST: I think a nice goal to have for the common IGF in Mexico if the mandate is renewed is to have gender balance in attendants, panelists, in all activities, basically, and also to make a very strong invitation to our colleagues all over the world, to have women come in from developing countries, indigenous background, and to really invite them to be part of this conversation.

>> MARILYN CADE: Marian.

>> MARIAN GORDON: Thank you very much. Marilyn, as you know, and many others play know, this is all new to me. I'm not new to public forums, but -- so what will come out of this? Will -- can we note that there seems to be a strong consensus for gender balance, that different examples were given around the world as to how that can be achieved, that we think that numbers, as you put it, are our friends. If we need to bear witness, the numbers can help us to do that, but to just send the signal that change is in the air and coming, as I do, from the Americas region, I just -- I very much welcome the comments just now from Mexico.

>> MARILYN CADE: So one of the -- let me respond to Mary Ann, and then we'll come to you. When the Dynamic Coalition on Gender and with APC's leadership did their first report card, it really was done as a facts-are-our-friend approach. It was if you don't know the facts, you can't argue the case kind of thing, righting? And as I constantly say, perceptions matter, but if you don't know the facts, you can't argue the case.

When they published the report card, it was -- the information was there and it was presented in a workshop, but it wasn't on the website, and today it's on the website, and so now we have much more visibility about the facts, and the updated version that they've done and the survey that we did and will polish and publish on the national and regional IGFs -- and Dafne, I'll be back in touch with you because maybe we can share that data -- we'll be publishing, that, and that is going to be distributed as an example of the success story of the national and regional IGFs, so we're going to be making it public.

Also in the -- there is a session on Friday where it's kind of an open mic session where people can identify emerging issues, and it's certainly possible that it -- that we could -- someone could go to the microphone and say this was a topic of discussion, and so you're not making a recommendation, you're sharing an observation, you're raising awareness, but I think what you can assume because of goal 5 and because we are a project of the UN Secretary General, certainly there is going to be an ongoing awareness about gender balance, and I think I'm going to be very optimistic and say that I am going to see all of you in Mexico next year at the IGF, since I'm confident that we're coming to Mexico, that having a visible objective of increasing the participation of women can be done without any mandate. It can be agreed to voluntarily.

So let me come to --

>> LIZA GARCIA: Good afternoon. My name is Liza Garcia from the Philippines, and I'm from Civil Society, and one of our objectives is to come up with our own national IGF, hopefully by next year. We have been actually preparing for it. Our organization is -- has started already doing initiatives for that, and what you have done is actually to have consultations in the different regions who just came up with a Philippine Declaration on Internet Rights and Principles that we want, and we did a crowd-sourcing of that as well as consulted in the different regions in the country, and one of the principles actually centered on gender equality.

Now, of course, we would want to -- we will try to have a balance. As always, in most of our -- the workshops, the conferences that we organize, we always try to achieve gender balance, but sometimes that is not possible because some women would not attend, and in this IGF that we are planning locally, of course, we would need for women to understand the relevance of the -- these spaces for them so that they would come.

Actually, this December we're planning to have a national consultation on gender and ICT that would focus on women's use and access to the Internet, and we're hoping that it would help so that women would understand the process and so that they would also engage in these different spaces.

And we would also want to include other sectors that are often not included, especially in the digital world, like the inclusion of women with disabilities and indigenous peoples as well whose voices often are not heard in these spaces. Thank you.

>> MARILYN CADE: Thank you very much, and I was actually in the Philippines at the CSTD intersessional there, and I am looking forward to the opportunity to maybe come to your national IGF. Dafne, I wanted to give you the microphone for a few minutes, and then we're going to get ready to do a wrap-up, but you've done a huge amount of work in this, and I thought if you don't mind speaking just a little bit more for the benefit of others who are here about the Dynamic Coalition and the work there.

>> DAFNE SABANES PLOU: Just a little anecdote. Yesterday I participated in a panel where we were about eight women, and we were talking -- only women, and the discussion was about a tech-related barriers against women and freedom of expression, and, you know, the thing that feminists want to censor the Internet and all that thing.

It was a very interesting panel and people from different regions there and so on, but when we finished, in the audience about 30% men were there, and one of them came up and said, why was it that there was no man in your panel, hey? So interesting because of course we think that men have a lot to say also about the issue, no, so in a way, you know, a little light, and perhaps you're doing the same, and today in the gender Dynamic Coalition session we had about 30% men also present there, and the interesting thing is that most of them were young men, so as you say, academics perhaps coming or students or also people from the technical world, but young people.

So perhaps, you know, it's in the younger generation that we have this interest in participating in these type of discussions, so I think there's something to look forward to there, no?

>> MARILYN CADE: WAVE was founded by a man who is from the Arab states and who believes very strongly that men must support the gender balance and equality if they -- we are to solve the problems of the world, which I think is quite interesting.

So it is not an effort to exclude the other 50% when we are trying to include this 50%.

I'm going to try to wrap up a little bit. I had asked us to think about, you know, do we think there should be gender -- a goal of gender equality, and, in fact, in some ways that question has already answered for us by the establishment of Goal 5 in the sustainable development goals, because at least at the UN level -- and this was signed off on and agreed to at the Sustainable Development Goal Summit in New York, which means that the world's governments have come together and said that they embrace that these 17 goals, some of which are about climate change but others are about ending poverty and food certainty, economic improvements, but these 17 goals are what the governments of the world and the citizens of the world should work together to achieve by 2030.

So it is, I think, something to ask ourselves, and that is -- we do need, -- I would say we do need to continue counting and to make the counting visible, to publish the facts.

People can be informed by information, and this could help them to adjust or change their attitude or even just to engage in a more informed discussion. I think we're going to see that continuation of publishing of the facts continue, and I would ask you all to think about your own views about, as we go forward, you know, do you have ideas about how that information can be used to better inform planning?

One comment that was made, Anja before you got here, Jane told an anecdote about a country she lived in where -- and worked in where she was helping a young professional woman to qualify for an international training course, and she -- the young woman asked her not to continue to advocate on her behalf because there are very limited opportunities to seek out that international training. She worked in the -- the employment numbers were 50/50, but the management numbers; that is, those were in management were largely male, and the perception was that there weren't enough opportunities, so the young woman was going to almost be criticized for pursuing the economic opportunity.

I think we may today -- that was about ten years ago when that happened. I'm familiar with that situation.

I think today perhaps we're in a slightly different situation where through the opportunity of the Internet, the online world, the introduction of ICTs, and the growth of new kinds of opportunities, perhaps we are in a world where the pie is big enough for everyone to be able to have a piece of it, if we're able to sort of advance the idea that by co-existing and collaborating and making opportunities for all that we're actually going to benefit our world, our children, our societies, and our economies, and that, I think, is the real reason why we want to count and we want to increase the number of women who are participating and are moving through the various levels of engagement and also able to participate as leaders, both in planning and then in presenting at the national, regional, and global IGFs.

I want to turn to my co-moderator, the person who was really the brains behind putting this session together, and ask you to make any closing comments.

>> NATHALIA SAUTCHUK PATRICIO: Our time is over. They close -- should close the session. I want to thank you for helping in the session, and thank the panelists for the amazing analysis and comments and all the audience for this great discussion here. Thank you all of you.

(Applause)

>> MARILYN CADE: And if some of you are particularly interested in engaging with the panelists in follow-up, I'd be happy to have you give your business cards to Nathalia, and she will share your contact details with the panelists for follow-up. Thank you, and thank you, in particular to the panelists who came and joined us with short notice.

(Applause)

(Session concluded at 1736)