Appendix A: Background Paper

2. Analyze the different impact of actions, programs, policies, and socio-economic trends on women and men;
   
   
3. Evaluate progress or change over a specific time period;
   
   
4. Identify which gender issues you need to take into account when designing a new program or policy;
   
   
5. Assess the different levels of access that women and men have to resources and the degree of control and power they have over these resources;
   
   
6. Measure and compare women's and men's participation levels within a specific sector;
   
   
7. Look at changes in women's and men's empowerment and the different levels of political power;
   
   
8. Analyze gender differences between women and men at each major stage of their life cycle. For example, the gender discrimination faced by babies is different from that faced by the elderly;
   
   
9. Help identify options.

All gender-based analysis models and tools are based on the idea that it is necessary to measure differences between women and men. Once you have recorded these you can figure out their underlying causes.

For example, if you collect statistics on the way women and men use the internet, you will begin to see certain patterns. A recent Canadian study showed that women's and men's general use of the internet was fairly equal. However, the study also found out that the majority (over 70%) of people who used the internet intensively were male (3). An Australian study found that women tend to use the internet mainly as a tool as opposed to seeing it as "a technology to be mastered or for games, gadgetry, machinery or power"(4). If we conducted a gender-based analysis to find out the reasons for this difference, it might show several things:

1. Canadian women use the internet less intensively than men due to their additional household, child and elder care responsibilities;
   
   
2. Women have less time to take the skills upgrading courses they need to make full use of internet resources;
   
   
3. Women tend to focus on specific tasks as opposed to trying out all the different functions of the software;
   
   
4. Women may have less access to intensive use of the internet as it costs more to use it for longer periods of time. Canadian women still generally earn less than Canadian men (5).
   
   
5. Women may use the internet less intensively due to the traditional biases and barriers they face in learning new technology.

(3) CIDA's Policy on Gender Equality 1999, Draft for Consultation, June 1998,
(4) Singh, Supriya, and Annette Ryan, Executive Summary: Gender Design and Electronic Commerce, Research Report No. 25,
(5) Canada's Survey of Consumer Finances, in The Earnings of Men and Women (1997)