Introduction to the special issue on digital government and gender

The exclusion of gender considerations from e-government research has also expanded to other areas of digital government. Only very recently, a few voices are starting to acknowledge the role of women in this field. That is the case, for example, of the Feminist Open Government Initiative in the framework of the Open Government Partnership, which promotes the ideas of equitable and equal access to transparency, participation and accountability from government, ensuring that governments are responsive to the diverse and gendered needs of all citizens, and that implementation of such initiatives is gender sensitive (Open Government Partnership, 2019). In the framework of open government, open data projects have also been useful to shed light on important topics concerning women, such as health, gender-based violence, equality, and empowerment (e.g. Equal Measures 2030, 2018). Research on smart cities has also echoed this trend and has explored whether, where, how, and why gender discriminations could emerge in the context of a smart city (Nesti, 2019). The use of big data and its potential applications for women seems to also be affected by a gender data gap that keeps highlighting the lack of gender diversity in technology (Criado Perez, 2019; D’Ignazio & Klein, 2020). And studies on Artificial Intelligence in the public sector have also expressed concern about the risk to develop gender-biased algorithms that may affect public service delivery (e.g., Agarwal, 2018; Busuioc, 2020; Leavy, 2018; Wirtz et al., 2019) but again, empirical research in this field is lacking. Given the scarce attention that the role of gender in digital government studies has received, which shows the need for further and consistent research, this Special Issue presents five articles, one comparative country report, and two book reviews, which characterize the current state of understanding and open an opportunity to build a research agenda on digital government and gender.