Digital Transformations?: Gendering the End User in Digital Government Policy

Abstract

Digital government strategies espouse user-centric design and citizen participation, but it is unclear how they explicitly address the needs of women, who are significant users of health, social welfare, and aged-care services. This article analyzes how Australia's 2015 Digital Transformations initiative, based on the British Gov.uk program, attends to international benchmarks for gender equality and empowerment in ICT policy. It finds gender awareness absent from construction of a service end user, with disability and ethnicity constituting the markers of sociocultural difference. In response it proposes gender-aware codesign principles for developing more equitable, effective online service delivery.

Introduction

This special issue is published at a moment when “digital government” agendas internationally are attempting to transform public sector services, with a focus on online delivery via broadband Internet, cloud computing, and mobile technologies. This is an unprecedented opening for reform of public services design and delivery to account for those sociocultural contexts of user experience, such as gender difference, that are not yet well incorporated into policy strategy or implementation. In Europe, the United States, Canada, India, Brazil, South Korea, Singapore, Saudi Arabia, Australia, New Zealand, and elsewhere, digital government policies have promised efficient, equitable, and empowering outcomes for all. Although these initiatives exhibit local variations, broadly speaking they are grounded in generic assumptions about the co-productive capacities, identity, and agency of citizens as so-called “end users” of evolving communications systems.

Whether such assumptions account for gender difference warrants close study, not least because of national governments' influential role in providing core social services and infrastructure, as well as steering and incubating digital technology take-up, use, and policy. States continue to set standards for information and communications technology (ICT) adoption and procurement, and use ICTs in public administration, elections, and political representation. Importantly, where they are signatories to international developmental conventions, such as the 1995 Beijing Platform for Action (PfA) on women's empowerment and participation in society, they commit themselves to promote ICT use in achieving social equality and human rights objectives.¹

Our concern is that the benefits of digital government for women, particularly those who experience multiple social disadvantages, exclusion, and marginalization, are not yet clear or even inevitable. For over a decade, critical analysis of electronic or e-government (the precursor rhetoric of digital government) has indicated that it may be associated with worsening inequality, diminished economic opportunities, or reduced social and cultural participation—for example, where ICTs have been used to help reduce face-to-face and call center services, in order to prune public service jobs or to deploy e-government in new systems of social and political control.² Further, where gender awareness is not foregrounded in ICT strategy, feminist studies in technology design suggest that the diversity of women's needs or preferences may be overlooked in favor of masculinist perspectives.³ The central question, then, is whether gender-aware digital government policy processes can better support women's capacity to access services online.⁴

We appreciate that a growing body of work around gender-neutral design seeks to establish and broaden norms of participation, access, and equity in technology design. We also recognize the imperative to acknowledge gender diversity beyond heteronormativity, in circumstances where “both gender and design are emergent.”⁵ However, more than two decades of research into the gendering of technology, from social shaping approaches⁶ through to gender sensitive design,⁷ has demonstrated that attending to women's needs can help designers meet gender objectives, test system complexity, and improve service outcomes for other users.

In light of the Beijing+20 review, then, this article explores how the Australian government configures women as users of digital government services. In 2015, the Australian federal government announced a new Digital Transformation Office (DTO) that would bring together developers, designers, researchers, and content specialists in developing an “end user” focus on service delivery.⁸ Its initial media release imagines that user as mobile, connected, and digitally literate:

Australia makes a useful case study of the sociocultural challenges in realizing such an approach to information services policy and design. While Australia is highly urbanized, around 10 percent of its 24 million citizens are dispersed over vast distances, in rural and remote locations, with often little access to on-ground services. A high proportion of this rural population are aged or Indigenous.¹⁰ Australia is also one of the world's most ethnically diverse nations, making intersectional issues common in service delivery. With this social and cultural diversity in mind, a gender analysis of Australia's digital government policy can also indicate design strategies that will meet the varied, interconnected needs of all service stakeholders.

In its concern with the way policy expression frames its ideal subjects, and the forms and scope of implementation, our study draws on deliberative policy frameworks for its analytical approach.¹¹ First, we examine how international gender equality and empowerment objectives have evolved, how they situate women's needs and interests in ICT policy, and how they intersect with recent digital government discourses. We consider in particular how the “user turn” in digital agendas projects a rhetorical concern with engaging active, participatory citizens in public service design. Our case study then analyzes how Australia's Digital Transformation policy attends to and constructs gender as a factor in reforming the delivery of online public services, with discussion of the implications for information design, accessibility, and affordability.

Gender Equality and ICT Policy

To understand why gender might be central to the concerns of digital government, we need to return to the 1990s and international moves to write gender awareness into communication and information policies. These were first consolidated in the UN-led formulation of the 1995 PfA, which gave equal weight to improving women's access to, and participation in, decision making via ICTs, and to their equitable representation in media content and employment.¹² The PfA objectives have been reinforced by five yearly reviews of national policy responses across the globe, as well as the incorporation of gender equity goals into the Millenium Development Goals (MDG) and World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) principles and action plans.

Yet in the Beijing+ reviews, media development has always been the primary focus, with less regard paid to nations' progress on information policy objectives. Beijing+10 in 2005 noted that governments were giving “limited attention” to problems of ICT access and participation, and the implementation report itself gave only fragmented mention of specific issues or achievements.¹³ It was only in 2010, with the linking of the PfA and the MDG, that the global Beijing+15 report highlighted that access to, and use of, ICTs was essential for educational and economic empowerment. Importantly, it also recommended that “all investments for technological upgrading … be gender sensitive and create jobs for women.”¹⁴

This more recent emphasis on gender sensitivity illustrates how, in the intervening years, the definition and focus of gender research and policy development have shifted beyond a needs-based agenda, to explore the extent to which gender encompasses the “socially constructed roles, relationships, and expectations of women and men and the ways that these are reinforced by educational, political, economic, and cultural systems.”¹⁵ This shift can be seen in debates around the institutional adoption of “gender mainstreaming” and the cultivation of gender expertise in policy development.¹⁶ Gender mainstreaming, the key conceptual framework for promoting gender equality since the 1990s (and reaffirmed in the recent WSIS+10 process), advocates consideration of gender difference in every aspect of policy development, from policy language and program design through to implementation and assessment, and eschews the idea of gender-neutral technologies. Its application to information policy, however, has been inconsistent, often instrumental and limited in scope.¹⁷ Mainstreaming too has often been insensitive to other aspects of cultural difference, with intersectionality studies now recognizing the ways that gender interacts with age, race, sexuality, class, disability, and “axes of disadvantage.”¹⁸ Policy making in this context needs to acknowledge and work across these differences, involving stakeholders in ways that reveal their complex, often dynamic identities, and engender their trust and copperation.¹⁹

As the language of policy reform shapes our perception and comprehension of what constitutes critical social change, our analysis of Australia's digital government strategy will examine its discursive attunement to gender and cultural difference as an indicator of the project's developmental trajectory. To situate this analysis in its unique national context, we will also survey and evaluate Australia's recent information policy development against international measures of gender progress.

Benchmarking of social development targets and tracking of outcomes are central to digital economy policies and broadband MDG politics in many jurisdictions. For its part, the 2003 WSIS plan of action calls for the development of gender-specific indicators on ICT use and needs, and measurable performance indicators “to assess the impact of funded ICT projects on the lives of women and girls.”²⁰ More recently UNESCO and the International Telecommunication Union's (ITU) 2013 Broadband Commission for Digital Development report proposes a broader suite of measures, to:

• 6.1. Integrate gender and national ICT and broadband policies.

• 6.2. Improve sex-disaggregated ICT statistics and measurement.

• 6.3. Take steps to boost the affordability and usability of ICT products and services.

• 6.4. Improve relevant and local content online.

• 6.5. Initiate an Action Plan to achieve gender equality in access to broadband by 2020.²¹

There is much to discuss about the appropriateness of such a framework for testing the gender sensitivity of digital government policy. However, it provides a current (if conceptually limited) interagency model against which we can gauge the scope of Australian government moves toward international gender equality objectives in information policy, and their relative prioritization in digital government planning.

It is also a useful empirical lens through which to consider the apparent “user turn” of digital service agendas and their strong claims to orient themselves to the interests of all users and everybody.

The “User Turn”

Digital government policies in the West tend to turn their attention to user-centered design principles. In the United Kingdom, the Government Digital Service (GDS) proclaims, “users … are at the centre of everything we do,”²² while in the United States, a “‘customer centric’ approach influences the creation, management and presentation of government information.”²³ The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) says state services should look to “re-organise themselves around user expectations, needs and associated requirements, rather than their own internal logic and needs.”²⁴ These are different policy responses not least in their political orientation to citizenship, but they share a determination to configure their services for everybody—citizens, publics, and customers (internal and external to government)—via commitments to accessibility of information platforms and openness of processes.

Participatory design processes are also integral to varying degrees. The OECD's Public Governance Committee, for example, declares that digital government services will give rise to greater “public engagement,” as well as citizen/state co-creation:

Such intentions are laudable, and suggest policy makers are starting to attend to the politics of interdependence and cooperative problem solving in heterogenous societies. Yet the OECD recommendations do not directly address gender equity, let alone cultural difference. Indeed, none of the digital government policies we have quoted here so far mentions gender as a factor of particular significance or sustainable and credible interest. We also see the limits of gender awareness in the EU's benchmarking of online public service delivery across nations. This compares the facility of undertaking “life event” tasks such as registering a child's birth or changed marital status, buying a house, or applying for disability allowance.²⁶ It does not examine the more difficult events women often face in their social coordination roles, such as finding childcare or aged care services, or the critical problem of dealing with domestic violence. So it is not obvious how these ostensibly user-centric digital government policies shape services for women users.

User-centered design principles are oriented toward supporting the behaviors and cultures of use of target user groups.²⁷ They are widely adopted, being described and stipulated in the International Organization for Standardization specification ISO 9241-210:2010, human-centered design for interactive systems. Accessibility is normally a core principle in terms of how users are configured—or in Steve Woolgar's classic terms, defined, enabled, and constrained.²⁸ Accessibility is a strategy for universal design that acknowledges the diversity of users' cultural attributes, capacities, and situations, and seeks to reduce barriers to use. It has a strong political dimension, which is most visible in legal campaigns for web and digital technology accessibility for people with disabilities. Yet while disability accessibility and related design requirements are making inroads into national and global media policy,²⁹ given the variable takeup of disability policy, the recognition and implementation of accessibility objectives, like gender objectives, cannot be assumed.

Nor can we presume the effective application of participatory design to digital government services. By turns related to, and in tension with, user-inflected approaches, participatory or codesign has a long, rich Scandinavian heritage involving Denmark's cooperative labor and educational movements. Participation here refers to users' involvement in all aspects of design, from scoping to implementation and evaluation.³⁰ Openness is a core philosophy, referring to the preference for designs that reveal their meaning and intent through use, and development processes that facilitate the exchange of knowledge and practices between diverse stakeholders. It is likely that the incorporation of participatory design rhetorics in digital government agendas comes via diverse interests in online citizen participation that were formalized in European policy during the 2000s.³¹

Rather than reprising the history or extensive literature surrounding e-government and citizen participation,³² instead we seek to see what sort of co-productive subjectivities and policy priorities the language and practices of digital government bring into being. The notion of the end user invoked in Australian policy, for example, stands in contrast to the participatory conception, as it refers to those who use an information technology after its design is first enclosed and it goes to market. “End” distinguishes this group from other expert users who have the knowledge to diagnose and rectify user problems, maintain support systems, or modify the product design. It is symbolically dis- rather than en-abling. A critical political reading might further probe the degree of empowerment afforded citizens laboring in online self-service information systems.

In her 2012 International Women's Day address, Elizabeth Broderick, Australian sex discrimination commissioner, argued that in order to understand whether women's interests have been considered, omitted, or elided in new policy initatives, we still have to ask the “women questions,” which reveal how gender has been recognized and configured:

In analyzing how gender is conceived and mobilized (if at all) in the configuring of the Australian digital government end user, we will first examine debates about the state of gender equality nationally. This will then locate our analysis of gender sensitivity in the evolution of the DTO and its multiagency, national information policy reform process.

Gender in Australia's Digital Transformations Agenda

It is fair to say that this analysis of digital government has been conducted during a period of ongoing national debate about the Australian federal government's commitment to gender equality. There is widespread concern that the current conservative Australian government has made few, if any, general gains on gender equality since its parties took power in 2013, unseating Julia Gillard's Labor government, the first to be led nationally by a woman. Incoming Prime Minister Tony Abbott became Minister for Women, absorbing the National Office for Women into his portfolio. In the period following, that government abandoned its paid parental leave scheme and the gender pay gap grew to its highest point, with women earning 18.8 percent less than men. Women have been significantly underrepresented in senior corporate and political roles. In 2014, women led only 3 percent of the country's top 200 companies. Under Abbott, women were less than one-third of all parliamentarians and one-fifth of all ministers, the sixth lowest representation of women in ministerial positions in the OECD—although following a leadership change, new Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull markedly increased the number of women in the ministry, including a new, female Minister for Women.³⁴

In a 2014 NGO report to the Beijing+20 review, a coalition of twenty-four Australian organizations argued there had been no progress on seven of the twelve areas of concern, and a reversal of gains in five: in economic terms, politics and decision-making, health, poverty, and the media. A key concern for that report was the “lack of Government engagement with marginalised communities that results in the interests and needs of [those] groups not being adequately considered and represented in legislation, policy and services at the national, state and local levels.”³⁵

Accessible, affordable social services are critical for gender equality, particularly in public health and carer support,³⁶ not least because women are more likely to experience poverty than men over their lifetimes.³⁷ Australian Bureau of Statistics reports also suggest that in 2012 women represented more than two-thirds (70 percent) of all primary carers, and were more likely to care for vulnerable elderly parents and children than men were.³⁸ Just over a third of those primary carers (37 percent) had a disability, and more than half of all primary carers were not in the labor force. Overall, more men (53.6 percent) than women (46.4 percent) received unemployment allowances from the government.³⁹ Yet recent cuts to the Australian Bureau of Statistics have seen threats to benchmark data collections such as the Work, Life, and Family Survey (the 2013 survey was canceled), which, among other things, tracks the incidence of mothers returning to work.⁴⁰

Against this gender politics terrain, we can position the Digital Transformations Initiative as part of a broader digital efficiency agenda, framed by the coalition's investment in free market ideology and foreshadowed in its Policy for E-Government and the Digital Economy (2013), tabled prior to its election. That document notes the difficulty of delimiting the conceptual territory of digital economy and society, “in an era when ICT is changing every industry.”⁴¹ However, it establishes ICT policy as a central means, alongside reduced regulation, to lift productivity and economic competitiveness. It also presents digital technologies as the default for service delivery to and interaction with citizens, saying a coalition government will:

The key coordinating body for this reform is the DTO, overseen by former Minister for Communications and now Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull. The DTO, which formally began its work on July 1, 2015, has largely adopted the developmental framework of the United Kingdom's GDS and is led by its former head, Paul Shetler.⁴³

However, Shetler faces a very different delivery context compared to the United Kingdom, in terms of market size, geography, and demographic spread. Australia's 23.8 million people may be concentrated in urban areas, with 66 percent living in capital cities and 89.4 percent overall living in regional cities and towns, but these centers are dispersed across a landmass nearly as large as the United States.⁴⁴ The 10.5 percent living in rural and remote areas include Indigenous communities, young primary industries workers, and an ageing cohort of farmers. If we take health as an example of a service priority, roughly a third of regional and remote Australians have less access to in situ health services than their metropolitan counterparts, but higher health risks, as well as a higher rate of accidental injury and chronic disease. This makes access to e-health information relatively more critical for these groups.

Further, while there is widespread uptake of Internet technologies, connectivity is still patchy and affordability is still an issue for low-income earners.⁴⁵ Eighty-three percent of Australian households had Internet access at home, with 77 percent having broadband connections, mostly wireless or DSL.⁴⁶ However, a 2013 coalition-commissioned study found that 1.6 million premises had “very poor or no fixed broadband access at all.”⁴⁷

The other challenge for the DTO is that it was allocated limited funding to achieve its plans—only AU$254.7 million over four years, of which just over 37 percent was to run the office operations, and the remainder to support flagship projects. This compares with a reported £58 million (AU$122 million) annually for the UK GDS and its integrated, whole of government plan. Nevertheless, in its first six months of operation, the DTO laid out an ambitious program centering on the simplicity and humanity of redesigning government services for all (Figure 1).

The first thing to note though is that the expression of this policy and strategy is gender neutral, with only one explicit mention of gender in the DTO documents, which include its Design Principles,⁴⁸Digital Service Standard,⁴⁹ and Design Guides (the last a collection of development resources under fourteen different section headings, from accessibility to website development). Of sixty top-level documents, only the Online Writing guide promoted gender sensitivity with reference to gender roles in culturally and linguistically diverse populations, and use of gender-neutral titles and pronouns. Women do figure iconographically in the Assisted Digital guide and there is a brief female aged carer profile in the Personas guide. However, the need for gender expertise does not figure in instructions for team building, user research, usability, or persona building.

This gender-neutral focus comes directly from the UK GDS Design Principles, which Australia “adopted” under the terms of the British Open Government licence v.3, for public sector information.⁵⁰ (Actually, the DTO simply copied the UK principles word for word, only omitting the UK examples in favor of Australian ones, to be added at a later date.) No matter, as the UK version brings a potentially very refreshing approach to reform of Australian government service access and delivery, promoting accessibility, legibility, readability, and inclusiveness, even at the expense of design “elegance,” as well as a focus on the needs of people who find online services “hardest to use.”

The crucial document for interpreting and implementing the Design Principles is the Digital Service Standard, which sets out fourteen criteria “that Australian Government digital services must meet to ensure our services are simpler, faster and easier to use.”⁵¹ In line with the UK Digital by Default Standard, the Australian policy exhorts staff to “Understand user needs. Research to develop a deep knowledge of who the service users are and what that means for the design of the service.”⁵² The means of understanding here, and in later criteria, is “research” rather than consultation or codesign. The Australian version also omits the UK's commitment to “ongoing user research and usability testing to continuously seek feedback from users to improve the service,” suggesting a lesser emphasis on ongoing user participation.

Comparing Australian policy with its UK source gives greater insight into how users are differently constructed in each national context. Firstly, the UK Digital by Default Service Standard strongly conveys the expectation that everyone will become a user, if not digitally literate:

• 14.

  Encourage all users to use the digital service (with assisted digital support if required), alongside an appropriate plan to phase out non-digital channels/services.⁵³

The Australian version of the Standards is more cautious:

• 12.

  Ensure that people who use the digital service can also use the other available channels if needed, without repetition or confusion.

• 13.

  Encourage users to choose the digital service and consolidate or phase out existing alternative channels where appropriate.⁵⁴

Here we see a much sounder recognition of the complexities of use and nonuse.

Yet a kind of essentialism lies at the heart of both agendas. What is the assurance that the digital service is equivalent to, or better than, the non-digital? More fundamentally, why should a service be delivered online, of necessity, if the non-digital service is more appropriate or effective? The guiding ideal is Internet delivery as default with “defined exceptions,” as set out under the “assisted digital” (Figure 2) part of the “accessibility” section, in the DTO Design Guides:

The Guides note that these non-digital options, however, “should not be heavily promoted beyond the target users as the intent is to encourage most people to interact digitally and independently.”⁵⁶

In summary, then, gender equity has not been key to the agenda setting, formulation, or implementation of Australian digital public service reforms. Meanwhile, Australian women are positioned as gender-neutral users or nonusers of online services and also as potential research subjects, but not as codesigners. Given these characteristics of the DTO's initial phase, how well is it positioned to influence gender inequities in the delivery of digital government services more broadly?

Digital Transformations?

If we revisit the international indicators of gender equality mentioned earlier in this article (namely, those deriving from UNESCO and ITU's 2013 Broadband Commission for Digital Development), we can see that the Digital Transformations Initiative only directly addresses two of these: the usability of ICT products and services, and the delivery of local content that assists women in accessing service information and support.

The DTO is not a remedy for differentiated or uneven ICT access, connectivity, or affordability. These are the focus of other parts of the policy framework––notably via the Universal Service Obligation (USO) in the Telecommunications Act, and the government's National Broadband Network (NBN) (delivering broadband services, in some form, across the country). It is not clear how the DTO will articulate into this national policy framework, especially when the various parts of it, such as the USO or NBN, do not yet recognize the need for mandatory afforadable Internet connectivity to access digital government services. For this reason, telecommunications scholar Mark Gregory argues for “the transition from the universal service regime to a universal access regime that enshrines the principle of ensuring that federal, state and local e-government and other specified digital services are reasonably accessible to all, on an equitable basis, wherever they work or live.”⁵⁷

In terms of available research and data on gender across all or any kind of ICTs, it is important to note that the Australian Bureau of Statistics currently provides only limited gender-disaggregated ICT statistics and measurement, and the DTO has no mandate to collect this type of data.

The invisibility of gender in reform-oriented DTO policy is not the only indicator that the federal government has yet to adopt strong forms of policy gender mainstreaming. Mentions of women and gender were absent from the Government 2.0 Primer, which provided participatory scenarios and tools for government agencies,⁵⁸ and from the mandatory requirements for public sector web development. The 2010 User Needs Analysis policy noted simply that user demographics must be considered, while the Access and Equity in Online Information and Services policy had linguistic and cultural diversity as its meter of accessibility and disadvantage, alongside disability, but not gender.⁵⁹ These preexisting diversity policies are now incorporated in DTO's “Inclusive Services” guide, with a brief pointer to “[c]onsider the needs of indigenous audiences,” but no strategy for assessing competing or intersectional needs.⁶⁰

Overall the DTO's goals, and the key concepts of digital government, are less aligned with concepts of equality or inclusion than convenience, efficiency, productivity, and cost reduction. Budgetary constraint is a key factor in Australia's transition to more extensive online, automated, and cross-platform service provision. In the past year, for example, the National Audit Office found social welfare agency Centrelink had been unable to answer 47 percent of the 56.8 million calls made to its telephone help line, with 13.7 million calls being unable to reach the line at all and 13 million calls abandoned before they were resolved.⁶¹ The crisis followed cuts to call center staff and changes to call handling. In response to public criticism, the Human Services Minister argued that “1980s technology” was at the heart of delays, and that smartphone apps and online services would be the “quickest and easiest way to interact with the department.”⁶²

Perhaps the DTO's most interesting new assumption of responsibility is not related to gender but to accessibility and disability. The Design Guides now include a substantial section on “Making Content Accessible,” followed by “Testing Web Accessibility: Ensuring Government Services Are Accessible to Everyone.” These note the three key policy frameworks that require accessibility––the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, the Australian Disability Discrimination Act 1992, and the Australian Web Accessibility National Transition Strategy (which requires conformity of government sites to World Wide Web Consortium [W3C] Web Content Accessibility Guidelines [WCAG] Version 2.0).⁶³ Early on in the establishment of the DTO, its disability and accessibility coordinating role was unclear. So it appears that these provisions have now been “bolted on” to its mandate—a very helpful sociocultural incorporation if DTO takes this seriously, and one that speaks to the notion of openness in terms of standards and information provision.

Web accessibility, however, is only one aspect of accessible government services, and it remains to be seen how DTO will address this, starting with the difficult, largely unaddressed issues of mobile accessibility. Here we can look beyond connectivity for evidence that social disadvantage is not a benchmark yet for service design. The new security provisions incorporated into the myGov platform require users to have a mobile phone that can receive SMS verification before they can log in to the service. A mobile phone number is a mandatory information point in account registration. Yet for homeless Australians, “shortage of credit, service and power restrictions, number changes and handset loss resulted in partial or restricted access to one or a number of mobile and Internet services.”⁶⁴

Clearly, then, there is a long way to go before principles of gender aware service design, let alone recognition of social inequality and diverse social identities, might be said to be meaningfully incorporated into the configuration of the everyuser, and her cross-platform engagement.

Conclusion

While specific DTO guidelines at least consider the needs of the linguistically and ethnically diverse and those with disabilities (a legacy perhaps of Australia's historic cultural diversity policies), gender is absent. This raises questions concerning the capacity of such initiatives to respond to the intersectional concerns of high-need, multiservice women users—such as elderly migrants seeking aged care services for frail and ill partners, or regionally based teenage girls with a disability. There is sufficient evidence to suggest that women will be significant users of online health and social services in particular, and carers of others who will require government aid. Thus the lack of gender awareness in the DTO's policy matrix suggests that its gender-neutral end user may be a convenient and cost-effective policy construct, rather than one that will necessarily achieve its declared aims of ease and user friendliness. This proposition deserves further comparative exploration to test whether the sublimation of gender to other markers of cultural diversity is evident in other national contexts, and what its rationales and impacts might be.

One year into the Australian DTO experiment, though, we can recognize a positive attempt to extend the temporal and spatial accessibility of agencies, and to provide alternatives to phone or face-to-face delivery that may be useful to people in rural and remote areas. Whether in the Australian context they make services more accessible or affordable to women and girls is a matter for debate. The lack of universal, affordable broadband Internet and uneven distribution of connectivity suggests not. Mobile verification and password protection certainly add additional hurdles to use. Ensuring the extension of low-cost, easy-access broadband and mobile services to all Australians could arguably have a larger immediate equity impact than a narrow focus on a digital services redesign.

That said, we contend that digital government should be gender sensitive by default. If online public sector service design is to deliver equitable outcomes for all users, attention to gender interests—like those of ethnicity and disability—should be clearly incorporated from the scoping or preplanning stage of online service projects onward. This would involve Australia's DTO directly acknowledging gender difference in its design guidelines and championing the adoption of gender expertise in service design and development teams. It should also ensure a gender balance and consideration of intersectional interests in any user consultation or user testing, and in post-project evaluations. Of equal concern is the status of gender mainstreaming in ICT policy internationally and in the worldwide move to digital government, and its effective embrace of intersectional concerns. Intersectional awareness will only bear fruit if institutions take time to explore gender and its complexities more deeply, and act on them in a more consultative, deliberative manner. Rather than trying to neutralize difference, the new digital agendas need to comprehend and respond to it, if they hope to support more effective responses to the complexity of managing work, relationship, and family relations in modern societies.

Fiona Martin and Gerard Goggin gratefully acknowledge the support of the Australian Research Council in the research and writing of this article, which arises from Gerard's Future Fellowship project on Disability and Digital Technology (FT130100097), Fiona's DECRA project Mediating the Conversation (DE130101267), and their joint ARC Discovery project Moving Media (DP120101971).

Footnotes

BIBLIOGRAPHY