Gender Intentionality in Digital Skilling

Gender Intentionality

Gender intentionality refers to the acknowledgement of gendered systems of power and the deliberate effort to challenge and transform these systems. By identifying gender-intentionality as the anchor, we began placing our framework within the program design of digital skilling programs to effectively address the unique barriers women and girls face in accessing and using technology. These include socio-cultural norms, time poverty, safety concerns, etc.

Through this lens, our approach addressed how well-tailored content, delivery, and outreach were to women’s realities. Such as offering flexible timings, local language content, female trainers, and community-based models—programs risk reinforcing existing exclusions. It also promotes intergenerational impact, as digitally empowered women often enable access for their families, catalysing broader digital inclusion and economic resilience.

Ideation and Methodology

Our approach to this study sat at a programmatic level and began with a landscape mapping of digital skilling programs across India, with emphasis on analysing a program’s strategy, curriculum, pedagogical approaches, and implementation strategies. This allowed the team to focus on the embeddedness of gender biases within the existing program design and delivery.

Gender analysis is a critical tool to uncover the differential access and barriers determined by one’s gender identity. A gender audit, on the other hand, provides a method that focuses on highlighting patterns across gaps and strengths at an organisational level (such as structures, composition, culture, and management of human resources, and design and delivery of policies). We decided early in the process that we would use gender auditing to understand programmatic insights across organisational structure and pedagogy (content and curriculum).

The selection of digital skilling programs required a rigorous shortlisting of active programs with regional, linguistic, and thematic relevance in the Indian context. To ensure a gender-sensitive evaluation of the programs, a gender analysis framework was developed and utilised as a guiding checklist to identify effective and contextually relevant approaches for rural women. Given the vast disconnect between program design and communities’ needs, we wanted to bridge this gap by designing with communities rather than for them, ensuring that programs were locally relevant and able to secure approval from stakeholders. Ultimately, we narrowed our collaboration with grassroots partners like the Manjari Foundation, Digital Green and Jagriti Enterprise Centre Purvanchal to ground our study.

The gender analysis framework itself was built by adapting established frameworks and theory, such as the ILO's Participatory Gender Audit Framework and the EQUALS Global Partnership's gender-transformative digital skills education framework.

Journey mapping was a central tool in this research and was used to break down the digital skilling process into systematic and actionable components. It helped the team map the end-to-end experience of women learners within SHGs allowing us to identify patterns, needs and gendered barriers to access that might be missed through a linear analysis. This approach offered a non-linear, yet systemic breakdown of complex systems into four key components: program strategy, learning approach (pedagogy), curriculum & content, and implementation model.

The Playbook

Through the study, we emphasised the importance of building a tool/platform which can aid digital skilling programs outside of our selection to ask questions:

Who are we designing for? What are we assuming about their lives, their confidence, their access? Whose knowledge and experience is shaping this curriculum? What happens after the training ends?

Through the Playbook, we hope to make these questions accessible and actionable. The playbook also features: a self-assessment quiz for organizations to measure their current level of gender intentionality, a gender audit framework to evaluate programs across design, delivery, and monitoring phases, and evidence-based insights to provide a "theory of change" for future skilling initiatives.

It is designed for program designers, trainers, policymakers, and anyone working at the intersection of digital access and gender equity in India. We designed and built a digital playbook that can be accessed here.

Way forward

When gender intentionality is woven into a program from the beginning, the result is not only more equitable. It is more effective, more sustainable, and more meaningful—for the women it serves, for their families, and for the communities that stand to gain when digital access becomes something everyone can actually use.