2024-04-25 15:18:58
MADRID, April 25. (EUROPE PRESS) –
The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) has warned that social networks affect girls’ well-being, learning and career opportunities.
This is confirmed by the UN agency in its report ‘Technology on their terms’, which concludes that although digital technologies can improve teaching and learning, they also pose risks such as invasion of privacy, distraction in education and cyberbullying.
Specifically, the report explains how social media reinforces gender stereotypes, and produces negative effects on girls’ well-being, learning and career opportunities.
“Minors increasingly socialize through social media. But all too often algorithm-based platforms reinforce their exposure to gender stereotypes,” says UNESCO Director-General Audrey Azoulay.
For the Director-General of UNESCO, the design of these platforms must “take ethical considerations into account”. “Social media should not confine women and girls to roles that limit their educational and professional aspirations,” she comments.
The report warns that image-based and algorithm-controlled content, particularly on social media, can expose girls to material ranging from sexual content to videos that celebrate unhealthy behavior or unrealistic body standards.
This exposure can have particularly damaging effects on girls’ self-esteem and body image. In turn, this affects their mental health and well-being, which is critical to academic success.
The report cites a Facebook study showing that 32% of teenage girls who feel bad regarding their bodies feel worse because of Instagram. It also highlights the addictive design of TikTok, characterized by short and attractive videos, a model of instant gratification that “can affect attention and learning habits, making it difficult to concentrate for long on educational and extracurricular tasks.”
GIRLS SUFFER MORE FROM CYBERBULLYING THAN BOYS
On the other hand, it reflects that girls are also more exposed to cyberbullying than boys. On average, across OECD countries with available data, 12% of 15-year-old girls reported experiencing cyberbullying, compared with 8% of boys.
This situation is exacerbated by the rise of image-based sexual content, AI-generated deepfakes and “self-generated” sexual images circulating online and in classrooms. Female students in several countries analyzed in the report said they had been exposed to images or videos they did not want to see.
The results show the importance of increasing investment in education – including media and information literacy – and “smarter” regulation of digital platforms, in line with UNESCO’s guidelines for the management of digital platforms, launched in November last year.
The report concludes that all these factors create “a vicious circle”: Girls are exposed to negative gender stereotypes reinforced by social networks, which keep them away from science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) studies because they are considered masculine fields and, as a consequently, they are denied the opportunity to design the tools that promote these stereotypes.
According to UNESCO data, women represent only 35% of STEM graduates worldwide, a figure that has not changed in the last ten years. The study shows that persistent prejudice “discourages women from pursuing STEM careers, resulting in a shortage of female workers in the technology industry.”
Women hold less than 25% of jobs in science, engineering, information and communication technology. They make up only 26% of employees in data analysis and artificial intelligence, 15% in engineering and 12% in cloud computing in the world’s largest economies. Globally, women file only 17% of patent applications.
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