Source: Bikya Masr
Women’s rights in the Arab world can be boosted by social media, a new study by the Arab Social Media Report said, citing nearly three-quarters of Arab users believing that new media can help improve women’s rights across the region.

Most users believe that social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter can be instrumental in helping to push forward women’s issues in the region.

The report said that 73 percent of those polled said female entitlements in the region would be bolstered through social media, while a staggering 82 percent believed that women’s participation can be improved through the same websites.

A majority of users also believed that these new media outlets, on the rise in the region following uprisings across the Middle East, will help support gender equality on the political sphere.

“On a regional level, a high percentage of respondents felt that social media could be an empowering tool for women, enhancing their participation in several facets of their lives,” said the report.

“Given the low ranking of most [Middle East] countries on gender equality and women’s empowerment indices, the participants’ optimistic responses indicate that social media users in the Arab region view this media as a potential catalyst for changing gender equalities.”

Ironically, the report argued that women’s participation in these very sites remains at a low level.

On Facebook, the most popular social media site in the region, only one-third of users are female, which contrasts to global levels that are fairly equal on usage.

In Egypt, Nehad Abu Komsan, the head of the Egyptian Center for Women’s Rights (ECWR), in a recent interview with Bikyamasr.com, said that she is hopeful about the rising use of social media and how “it can create new modes of discussion whereas only a few years ago, it made discussing women’s issues more difficult.”

Case in point for Egyptian users was the video of a female protester who was beaten and stripped to her bra by Egyptian soldiers earlier this month. The video was shared widely on social media sites and quickly went viral, sparking a number of women’s rights marches in the country.

While the report on social media does hint that the divide between the public and the online world still has a ways to go, the optimism of current users have observers excited about the use of new technology and the development of women’s rights and women’s empowerment.