Gender dynamics in digital health: overcoming blind spots and biases to seize opportunities and responsibilities for transformative health systems

When digital health interventions are gender-blind, they may potentially place key intended populations further risk at risk. For example, digital health programmes may threaten familial relationships if the messaging empowers practices in conflict with prevailing social norms.

A critical first step in developing digital health solutions that support gender equality is to understand existing gender inequalities and power relations. Consulting and engaging marginalised women – as well as men, leaders, decision-makers, and gatekeepers – is vital to ensuring that interventions address their needs and do not further harm them.

Addressing gender inequality through digital health also requires exploring how gender intersects with other social stratifiers to influence experiences of marginalisation. Women, girls, and other marginalised gender identities are often targeted as homogenous groups and not given opportunities to actively engage in and shape projects to better fit their needs.

Providing sustained support over time, across all health system stakeholders and levels, is necessary to ensure that transformative change is not limited to one subset of actors in the health system. Incremental learning and reflection are also required in order to nurture acceptance and respond to unanticipated reactions.