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.