Introduction to the special issue on digital government and gender

Information and communication technologies (ICTs) are not gender-neutral: they are not accessed, managed and controlled by all men and women equally. According to the International Telecommunications Union (2019), women are lagging behind men in making use of the Internet in almost two thirds of countries worldwide. Overall, the proportion of all women using the Internet globally is 48%, compared with 58% of all men. More men than women use the Internet in every region of the world except in the Americas, where the gender gap continues to hover around 0 and in the European Union (EU), where the percentage of men using the Internet in 2020 was 89,4 compared with 88,1 of women.1 In Africa, the Arab States and Asia-Pacific, meanwhile, the digital gender gap is starting to grow.