"Women Must Not Be Left Behind”: The UNESCO Path Towards Women's Empowerment

This chapter aims to retrace the efforts of the international community in defining and implementing the “functional education,” allowing women to access the necessary knowledge and competences to stimulate the socioeconomic development, combat the effects of conflicts on their empowerment, and become protagonists of the transition to the digital era. Education and training become the privileged field for international confrontation on gender equality, resulting in a commitment to grant equal opportunities in education and training as an intrinsic right of women. In a diachronic perspective, however, despite the positive afflatus of the first attempts, a substantive approach centred on the individual's capacity to access rights, resources, services and technologies is only later envisaged, which then finds a new definition in the concept of capability approach. UNESCO's dedication to abolish gender discrimination in accessing education in its different grades and fields (adopted as a case-study) makes it apparent that in the colonial and postcolonial era, the commitment of the international community has been directed to sustain equal access for women to all grades and modes of education, within the wider and more complex frame of promoting gender equality and women's empowerment. Today, Eleonor Roosevelt's slogan Making Human Rights Come Alive (Columbia University, 1949) has become one of the guiding principles of the 2030 Agenda and of its development goals. Women must not be left behind: women must be granted equal access to technology education, where they must be able to compete with men for future professions, through policies, strategies, and programmes aiming to reduce/delete digital divide adopted by national governments.