By Online feminism could encourage women’s political participation and change things for the better for women as well as the country argue many feminine activists and politicians.
Lihini Fernando, a female politician and lawyer points out that The global average of women’s representation in politics is 24.6%, in the Asian region it’s 20.5%, in Sri Lanka, it’s 5.3%, with the women population being 52%. Online feminism on digital platforms has been proposed as a means of awareness raising in changing public perception and increasing political participation of women.Sri Lanka has widespread internet penetration with 11.34 million internet users in January 2021 out of the 21.46 million overall population.
Among the 11.34 million internet users 8.20 million were social media users.
Facebook and YouTube are the most popular social media platforms. Hashtags such as. #GiveUsOurStolenMoneyBack, #GoHomeGota, and GoHomeRajapaksha trended from March to May 2022 and created a huge impact.
Social media users in Sri Lanka significantly increased by 1.5 million (+23%) between 2020 and 2021, while internet users in Sri Lanka also increased dramatically by 800,000 (+7.9%) .
Given this encouraging scenario, an opinion piece on ground views argues that new media technologies could be used to ‘ create an environment for all women to succeed and feel safe in the political system, leading to an empowered society being more receptive toward female leadership and achieving gender equality in politics
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