Putting phones into women’s hands

Last week, the GSM Association launched a new initiative called the mWomen Program—or “Programme” in European parlance—which seeks to bring the socio-economic benefits of mobile communications to women worldwide. That might seem like an odd issue to us here in the U.S., where women have just as much access to mobile phones and services as men, but in the developing world it’s often a different story.

According to a study conducted by the Cherie Blair Foundation for Women and the GSMA, there’s a worldwide gender gap of 300 million more men using mobile services than women. Since most of the major subscriber growth in the world is in the developing markets, that gap will only increase if things stay the same.

Why does that gap exist? According to the study, a lot of it is cultural. In developing markets, men are the heads of the households and control the finances of the family, which leads them to favor themselves for the purchase of a mobile phone rather than their spouses. That’s why a good deal of the mWomen initiative will target men, not women, educating them on the benefits that mobile can provide for the women in their families and the benefits the whole family will accrue once a phone is placed in women’s hands, said Chris Locke, managing director for the GSMA Development Fund.

“The advertising is target the head of the household because they’re the ones who will make the decisions,” Locke said. “One of the biggest barriers that needs to be overcome is a cultural one.”

There’s economic as well as social reasons for this approach, based on work done in developing markets with microfinance, which delivers very small loans to individuals and families to start or expand their businesses. Microfinance organizations have discovered if those loans are made to the women in a family rather than the men, there’s a much greater chance that those funds will be invested productively into a business enterprise rather than squandered on personal use, Locke said.

“We recognize that if you support the women in the family, the benefit will likely spread across the family as a whole,” Locke said.

Organizations like USAID, the World Bank, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation are backing the initiative, and US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton helped launch the program in Washington. But operators and vendors like AT&T (NYSE:T), Vodafone (NYSE:VOD) and Nokia (NYSE:NOK) are also getting involved, as well they should.

Apart from women themselves, the wireless industry probably has the biggest stake in seeing mobile communications spread equitable across the sexes, just as it promulgating wireless across classes and across borders. It’s hard to reach 100% global penetration and trigger the mobile data revolution if a huge portion of the global population is left on the sidelines. But even more compelling is the opportunity to make mobile services meaningful when by placing devices in women’s hands. According to the mWomen Program, there are a wealth of new applications and services that could be tapped as the mobile penetrates further into the family. Education services and maternal health information could be accessed from even the most basic text or data-enabled phone. When even a subscriber paying less than $2 a month can access mobile applications, then the mobile data revolution has truly arrived.