Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Immigrant Women’S Experiences Of Using Mobile Phones: Counting Pennies To Connect Across Continents, Parul Malik, Lorraine Gayle Kisselburgh

ADVANCE-Purdue Gender and STEM Research Symposium

There are many success stories of women around the world using information communication technologies (ITCs) to empower themselves. Most research on ICT-enabled empowerment tends to focus on rural women in emerging economies. Little attention has been paid to their low income, immigrant counterparts living in North American cities. Using 30 interviews with Bangladeshi and Ethiopian women who recently immigrated to New York City, this exploratory study describes the barriers to the use of mobile phones amongst immigrant women. A majority of these women were dependents of construction workers and cab drivers, while the others had operative level positions in retail …