Section 2 | FOUNDATIONAL FACTORS smallholder farmers to international processors.80 With 53 percent of the rural population owning a mobile phone in 2016, digital devices have clearly become a household asset. And where women lack control over those assets, the gender digital divide clearly contributes to women’s vulnerability to changes in the natural environment: “At the household level, the ability to adapt to changes in the climate depends on control over land, money, credit, and tools; low dependency ratios; good health and personal mobility; household entitlements and food security; secure housing in safe locations; and freedom from violence... Women at the study villages [near Inle Lake] are far away from being able to adapt [to] climate changes.”81 2.2 Gender and Power Clearly, gender-based roles and expectations are vitally important to shaping the gender digital divide—and devising effective strategies to close it. Such norms shift over time IREX INSIGHT and place, along the national timeline and individual life cycles. Given Myanmar’s ethnic Subtle control issues related diversity, wide disparities in wealth, and pronounced rural/urban divide, it is inaccurate to to ICTs contribute more to the speak of any gender norms as countrywide. This section outlines broad categories of gender pervasive gender digital divide norms in Myanmar today that are useful to deepen understanding of the political economy of the gender digital divide. in Myanmar than access gaps between men and women. DIFFERENT BUT EQUAL Many accounts of gender relations from the colonial era depicted the “traditional” high status of women in Burma, celebrating their freedom, independence, and power (according to Western notions of power grounded in economic measures such property ownership and inheritance customs), and international suffragist movements held Burma up as an example to emulate.82 Although more recent regimes in Myanmar have appropriated this image of gender equality, then as now, the story is more complex. The field research conducted for this assessment confirmed an observation made in a recent country-wide study on culture and social norms in Myanmar: “There is, on the one hand, a failure [among respondents] to notice gender inequality. On the other hand, there is a tendency to justify gender-based differences with cultural and religious arguments and references.”83 Deeply internalized norms about power relations related to gender, age, spirituality, precedence, and hierarchy mean that differences are perceived as normal and right, therefore requiring no special measures to achieve equity or equality. In this way, some gender norms function as obstacles to addressing the gender digital divide. It is either invisible or dismissed as inevitable. 80 Emerging Markets Consulting, USAID, and Winrock International, Value Chains for Rural Development: Social and Gender Assessment (Washington, DC: USAID, September 2015). 81 United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), Gender Analysis at Intha, Pa-O, Danu and Taung-Yoe Villages Around Inle Lake (Yangon: UNDP Myanmar, December 2012), 80. 82 Chie Ikeya, Refiguring Women, Colonialism and Modernity in Burma (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2012). 83 Gender Equality Network (GEN), Raising the Curtain: Cultural Norms, Social Practices and Gender Equality in Myanmar (Yangon: Gender Equality Network, November 2015). “Burmese women have been told that they do not need to be empowered, that they already have the same rights as men. But they have been socialised to accept that men are leaders and they should be followers. Women have been taught to prioritise their families, their culture and their nation over the development of their own talents and potential. They have been encouraged to accept ideas, practices and institutions that deny them the same opportunities as men to exercise power and influence in their own society.” —Harriden 2012 Ending the Gender Digital Divide in Myanmar: A Problem-Driven Political Economy Assessment | 29