Excluded: How women suffer from digital poverty in the UK

Women in ethnic minority communities are most likely to suffer the economic and social disadvantages that this brings.

Until the first wave of COVID-19 hit the United Kingdom last year, Karon, who prefers not to give her full name, only ever made limited use of the internet. The last time there had been a functioning computer in her South London home, her husband was still alive: that was in 2016. The final years of his life were punishing on the family. He had been made redundant from his job as a digital map librarian for a chartered surveyor, when Karon was pregnant with their daughter, Sian, in 2009. She would find him hunched over the keyboard, tapping away in his search for a new job. “I mostly used the computer to store family photos, but not much else. We’d been talking about getting a new one before he died,” Karon, 52, says. This plan never came to fruition, however, as most of her time was consumed by the staggering trials that lay ahead of her in her untimely bereavement. Karon had worked as a teaching assistant at several primary schools and nurseries. Suddenly, she was also the main carer for Sian, now 11, who was born with a rare neurodevelopmental disorder that causes severe motor and speech impairment. Even with state-provided childcare support coming out of her tax credits, things were difficult for the two of them. For 18 months after her husband’s death, Karon continued to work, but the strain of finding the childcare that Sian needed while she was away from home started to take its toll and she was forced to give up work for a time.