A painting of a woman using an iPad, a vase depicting children dreaming of computers – both historical objects with a contemporary twist highlighting the world’s growing digital divide during the coronavirus pandemic.

The exhibition at Barcelona’s Analog Museum of Digital Inequality aims to show how this gap – laid bare by COVID-19 -disproportionately affects women and low-income and ethnic minority groups.

The so-called “digital divide” refers to the gap between those who have access to computers and the internet, and those with limited or no access.

About 54% of the global population used the internet last year, but less than a fifth of people in the least-developed countries were online, according to the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), a United Nations agency.

“Technological inequality is a hidden problem, (but) it has become especially obvious throughout this unprecedented year,” said Isabella Longo, project director at BIT Habitat, the nonprofit behind the exhibition, which opened last month.

With the pandemic forcing people everywhere to move online for work, school and socialising, citizens and governments have had to take a technological leap, which risks leaving some behind, she said.

“Technology has been a barrier for those people without (computer) skills and who are often part of groups at risk of social exclusion,” Longo told the Thomson Reuters Foundation in a phone interview.

The pandemic has not only revealed the extent of digital inequality, but has also widened it drastically, say tech experts.

“The digital divide has always been there, but what the COVID-19 pandemic has done is turn it into a canyon,” said Lourdes Montenegro, digital inclusion lead at the nonprofit World Benchmarking Alliance, which earlier this month launched a corporate digital inclusion benchmark.

“As more businesses embrace digitalisation as an adaptation to the pandemic, we run the risk of leaving more people behind,” he said.

DIGITAL GENDER GAP

The exhibition, which is planned to run until late next year, includes a painting created this year by Spanish artist Yaiza Ares called “From an iPad” which highlights the gender gap.

The artwork, a reinterpretation of American realist painter Edward Hopper’s “Hotel Room,” depicts a woman sitting on a bed and looking at text on an iPad that reads: “Only 17% of technology specialists in Europe are women.”

The digital gender gap remains a persistent issue, one that needs radical cultural, structural and systemic change, said Longo.

A 2018 report by the European Parliament found that women tend to avoid studies in information and communication technology (ICT) and are under-represented in digital careers.

In the European Union, nearly four times as many men as women graduated from ICT courses in 2020, according to the EU’s statistics office Eurostat.

Inadequate economic resources also make women less likely to have access to technology, resulting in a lack of digital skills that are transferable to the workplace, policy experts say.

In some regions, the gender divide is significantly more pronounced, with South Asian women about 70% less likely than men to have a smartphone and African women more than 30% less likely, according to the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development.

The pandemic has exacerbated existing gender inequalities due to increased telecommuting, said Konstantina Davaki, a social policy fellow at the London School of Economics.

Women are over-represented in casual, part-time and temporary jobs that offer little flexibility to work from home, she explained.

And as job markets continue to deteriorate due to the pandemic, further reducing women’s digital access, “the digital gender gap is likely to deepen,” Davaki said in emailed comments.

‘WHOLESALE LEARNING LOSS’

While some children sit studiously doing maths and art classes at their home computers, other less fortunate ones look on wistfully, wishing they had their own screens.

The scene decorates a ceramic pot by Spanish artist Maria Melero – her modern-day version of an ancient Greek pot – which is included in the exhibition to illustrate how the digital divide has impacted children.

Children’s charities say school closures have spotlighted the digital divide among children from different socio-economic groups.

Two-thirds of the world’s school-aged children do not have internet at home, according to a report published last month by UNICEF, the United Nations children’s agency, and the ITU.

Nearly 250 million students worldwide are still out of school due to COVID-19-related closures, it said.

“Closing the digital divide is a fundamental equity issue, critical to breaking the cycle of poverty,” said Lane McBride, a partner at Boston Consulting Group.

Only then can students develop crucial digital literacy, as well as professional and technical skills that they will need in their future careers, he wrote in an email.

“With the onset of the pandemic, this divide has threatened wholesale learning loss,” said McBride.

Davaki, the social policy expert, said that permanently closing the digital divide requires state institutions, policymakers, civil society and the private sector to cooperate to ensure that everyone, everywhere can get online for free.

“Access to technological infrastructure and the internet must be guaranteed to all communities and be free of charge,” she said.

Passersby ignore a beggar, homophobic insults crowd a wall, a woman burns a note penned to a “victim” – not the usual stuff of comics but all vignettes from a new graphic novel by homeless people that aims to kill the stigma surrounding street life.

The Book of Homelessness, launched this week by a youth homelessness charity, compiles drawings, texts and poems by people living in shelters, hostels and temporary accommodation.

“You don’t often hear about who homeless people are and why they’re out there, you think it’s just their fault,” said Mitchell Ceney, who was homeless for about three years and now has a short-term home in West London.

“Getting it down on paper is a way of turning my negative past into something positive for the future,” said the 36-year-old, who drew a man fleeing a supermarket, a flashback to his own shoplifting days.

With protections ending for hard-pressed renters and the newly jobless rising in the pandemic, about 230,000 people are at risk of becoming homeless, according to the charity Shelter. Health experts say the homeless are in greater danger from COVID-19 due to a weakened immune system caused by poor food and lack of sleep, along with over-crowding and bad sanitation.

“People are much closer to the edge than they were before the pandemic,” said Marice Cumber, founder of Accumulate, the homeless charity behind the graphic novel. “It really could be anyone,” she told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

The government has pledged 15 million pounds to a handful of areas with the highest number of rough sleepers, including London, Bristol and Cornwall, to help get them through to March. Cumber is no stranger to mixing art with action – past projects include a radio station run by homeless people – and

she encouraged the 18 contributors to “tell their own stories that don’t have to be about why they’re homeless”. Profits will be shared by the authors and Accumulate, said Cumber, whose charity funds scholarships for creative courses. For Ceney, who used to be a chef and hopes to earn an illustration degree next year – the book is just a start.

“It’s given me something to be proud of,” he said. “And maybe my experience can help someone else.”

By Zoe Tabary @zoetabary, Editing by Lyndsay Griffiths.

Australia Post has backed a months-long campaign to add Aboriginal place names in addresses to recognise the country’s indigenous people and the traditional names of their lands.

Rachael McPhail, an Aboriginal woman, began a social media campaign in August to ask Australia Post to add traditional place names to postal addresses. She also started an online petition that gained about 15,000 signatures.

“Every area on this continent now known as Australia has an original place name,” McPhail said in her petition.

“I am calling for place names to be made part of the official address information in Australia, the same as postcodes and street names,” said McPhail, who began her campaign by posting pictures of her mail with the Aboriginal name.

This week, Australia Post updated its guidelines for sending and receiving mail, with a section on traditional place names “to acknowledge the traditional custodians of the land”.

Australia Post has “a long history of promoting and celebrating indigenous culture and implementing measures that contribute to a lasting reconciliation between indigenous and non-indigenous Australians”, a spokeswoman said.

A sample visual on the Australia Post website features McPhail’s name and the traditional name Wiradjuri Country, for the area in New South Wales where she lives.

Australia’s Aboriginal people were dispossessed when the continent was colonised by Britain in the 18th century.

The country’s 700,000 or so indigenous citizens track near the bottom on almost every economic and social indicator.

Indigenous activists have long called for native land rights to be recognised, and to revert to names given by traditional landowners who can trace their lineage back 60,000 years, instead of those given by white settlers.

As protests over racial inequality swept across many parts of the world earlier this year, Australia saw a renewed push for renaming landmarks and places.

“It is a way of acknowledging the traditional owners and their ancestors, and acknowledging that all these places have names that have been supplanted by British names,” said Marcia Langton, an associate professor of indigenous studies at the University of Melbourne.

“I see no reason why places can’t have two names. This has happened across the world as people free themselves from colonial legacies,” she said, pointing to Mumbai which was previously Bombay, and Beijing which was once named Peking.

The push to restore indigenous place names has had some success in neighbouring New Zealand, where many Maori place names have been restored, with other places holding dual names.

Earlier this year, companies including telecommunications firm Vodafone vowed to use the country’s indigenous name Aotearoa more frequently in their operations.

Australia Post’s move “is an important first step towards decolonization”, McPhail said.

In a social media post, she said she will now lobby Australia Post to consult with indigenous elders to create “a comprehensive database that records the original place names from before colonization”.

By Rina Chandran @rinachandran; Editing by Michael Taylor.