Resident Coordinator's Remarks at the Girls in ICT Day Thailand 2022 Opening Ceremony

It is my great pleasure to join the opening ceremony for Girls in ICT Day and celebrate making this a year-round initiative supporting young women and girls in ICT and STEM education.

Let me extend my thanks to the Permanent Secretary, Khun Ajarin Pattanapanchai, Ministry of Digital Economy and Society, Permanent Secretary Dr. Suphat Champatong, Ministry of Education, and the National Broadcasting and Telecommunication Commission (NBTC) and Asia-Pacific Telecommunity (APT), for your leadership and support in making Girls in ICT such a success in Thailand, as well as your longstanding partnerships with the UN to promote gender equality, digital education, and equal access and opportunity.

I want to speak directly to the young women and girls who are attending today, both here in person and online. It is your achievements, intelligence, and hard work that we are celebrating. We rely on you as role models, tutors, and leaders in ICT to reshape Thailand’s digital landscape, achieve national development goals, and strengthen gender equality for the benefit of all.

Working with the Girls in ICT programme, the UN has collaborated with many students who are at the forefront of this change. Khun Jidapa, a student at Pattaya Redemptorist Technological College for People with Disabilities, summed up our shared mission clearly:

Every woman and girl has equal ability and potential in ICT with Khun Jidapa wanting to be part of a bigger communitycontributing ideas and making positive change.

That leadership is what Girls in ICT is all about and, I want to emphasize for the women and girls here today, the power is in your hands.

As we know, Thailand stands out in gender equality in some dimensions, with girls and women often outperformingboys and men in education and nearly equal rates of digital access and internet connectivity. However, there is room to improve, with women underrepresented in some STEM fields and a gender wage gap of nearly 11%.

There are still systemic inequalities within the STEM fields worldwide that we need to tackle, leading to barriers to the full participation of women and girls, and weaknesses such as gender bias in AI, which reinforces negative stereotypes in the algorithms and distorts our view of reality.

Women and girls’ intellectual contributions to these fields is essential to realize the full potential of ICT to make positive changes in society.

Girls in ICT is important within the UN’s overall work towards the SDGs. Artificial Intelligence, the ethical and human rights principles involved in ICTs, and gender issues in AI and STEM are all crucial areas of the curriculum.

I strongly encourage you to learn from the practical lessons offered by the speakers today, and in turn develop your own ideas and become co-creators and designers of this new digital reality. Women’s networks are essential to provide mutual support, offer learning resources and best practices, and uphold role models whose achievements demonstrate the successes that women and girls can achieve in science and technology.

The UN is committed to working with girls and young women for the long term, and we look forward to our continued partnership through Girls in ICT. The potential of emerging technologies is limitless – this is your toolbox and you have the power to build a new reality as you will.