Gender Advocacy in Social Media Sphere - A Review of Possibilities& Challenges

With an objective to create progressive conversations around the question of gender equality, governments, privately owned organizations and development counterparts like NGOs engage a variety of mass communications tools including those available on social media. However, the trends across the geographies / communities in general suggest that incidents of gender-based violence are on a rise. This demands a larger level introspection into the hitherto implemented communications strategies in the area of gender advocacy, to assess whether such campaigns delivered desired goal of social change and transformation. To start with, this study limits its scope to an examination of academic literature on various gender advocacy campaigns carried out on social media. Social media usage by privately-owned organizations in gender advocacy have often fetched exemplary results internationally, however the experience of developing countries is different, as gender advocates and governments are yet to use the potential of this medium to the optimum. In this context, a study evaluating past initiatives will help the governments and NGOs to understand the gaps and bridge the same while implementing future projects. Further, there is a dearth of such focus studies in the public domain, all the more a reason for this research paper.