TEQtogether

Origins

TEQtogether was founded in 2018 by Tim Unwin and Liz Quaglia from the UNESCO Chair in ICT4D at Royal Holloway, University of London.  They were both convinced that despite all of the good work already undertaken to support women in and through digital technologies and other ICTs, more remains to be done to change men’s attitudes and behaviours with respect to the women-technology interface. The onset of COVID-19 led to a re-prioritisation of their activities by those volunteers who were originally involved in TEQtogether during 2021 and 2022, and little has been added to the TEQtogether.org site since then. Many of the original team remain very much committed to its objectives, and much of the content of their site was moved to the ICT4D Collective site in 2026. Find out more through the following links:

The Challenge: TEQtogether is committed to changing men’s attitudes and behaviours towards women and technology.

Digital technologies can be used to bring great benefits to individuals and communities.  However, they also have a darker side, increasing inequalities and being widely used for abuse and harassment.  This is especially true at the interface between women and technology. Women are not only often marginalised in the tech sector, but they are also frequently violated through technology.

It is widely recognised that there has long been gender inequality within the tech sector, but what is less well known is that this gender equality is increasing.  The ITU thus notes that “The global Internet user gender gap grew from 11% in 2013 to 12% in 2016. The gap remains large in the world’s Least Developed Countries (LDCs) — at 31%. In 2016, the regional gender gap is largest in Africa (23%) and smallest in the Americas (2%)”.

One of the main reasons for such failure is that many previous initiatives have been led by women for women, and have focused particularly on ways through which women can be supported in developing careers in the tech sector or using Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) otherwise to improve their lives.  Gender inequality still exists, though, in large part because of the failure of many such initiatives sufficiently to change men’s attitudes, and to involve men centrally in changing their behaviours that lead to the abuse and harassment of women through digital technologies.  TEQtogether is intended explicitly to address this failure, using ICTs together to change men’s attitudes and behaviours.

Why TEQtogether

TEQtogether combines technology (T), equality (EQ) and the need for men to work together with women to address this challenge (together). Each of these ideas is complex and contested, but can be summarised as follows:

• Technology (T). Digital technologies, or ICTs, have been used to transform the world over the last two decades. Their appropriate use has huge potential to change lives for the better.  However, they can also be used to damage lives.  TEQtogether is committed to ensuring that women benefit from, and are not harmed through, the use of technology.  It recognises that there are much broader issues around gender and development, but it focuses explicitly on technological aspects of this inequality.
• Equality (EQ). TEQtogether is based on the premise that equality of opportunity to the benefits of technology is of central importance in empowering people’s lives. Substantial evidence exists to show that women across the world are less engaged with technology than are men, and are also more abused through it than are men.  TEQtogether recognises the full complexity of LGBTIQ agendas but focuses specifically on working with men to increase the involvement of women in the tech sector, and in reducing harassment and abuse of women by men through technology.
• Together (together). There are many existing initiatives (see our Other Initiatives page) that focus on how women can support each other in the tech sector, but far fewer that address what men need to do to support equality of opportunity and empowerment at the interface between gender and technology.  Many of the initiatives that have already started to focus on this area have begun to use the term “allies” to emphasise the ways that men can support women in the sector.  The use of the word “together”, though, emphasises that TEQtogether is not about “men for women” or “men as allies of women”, but rather that we must all work together if positive changes are to be made.  In particular, men need to learn from women about how to change their own lives, and we all need to work together to change existing processes and structures that lead to inequality.

For more about “Why TEQtogether” see the video (20 min) by Tim Unwin, answering questions from Natalia Robinson in 2021, on why he and Liz Quaglia set up TEQtogether.

Page created 29 August 2026