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🪡 Documentation

October 11 | SESSION 3: Understanding ICT laws, policy, and gender

Facilitated by Eleanor of A4AI and Marwa of APC, the session was focused on identifying policy problems of digital inequalities with the focus on gender, the extent of gender digital divide and how they are measured, mapping the stakeholders in making gender responsive policy, as well as a series of tools, methodologies, and frameworks to incorporate gender in policy development process.

Key highlights:

  1. A lot of discussions regarding gender in the policy space still fall within the binary lines. We need to realise gender itself can be dissected further as women, in all their diversities, are not homogenous. As such, contexts will change according to countries or other aspects in your work.
  2. When we want to see how women are able to use the internet, access, or stay on the internet, we still look from the perspective of men e.g. as demonstrated by digital gender divide calculation shown by ITU and GSMA. Webfoundation challenged this and called for a women-centric perspective to understand that gives a clear picture of how wide the digital gender divide is and what needs to be done in order to challenge it.
  3. In many cultures that are still male-dominated, women do not still feel safe to be online, not only due to online harassment or OGBV, but also due to men custodianship who feel women are not safe to be online. We see this coming through in many cultures, so we need to see this when we develop policy e.g. we have to talk to religious leaders and many stakeholders and get them involved in these processes. We need to also factor into these indicators as we try to influence policy or look at how laws and legislation can close these gaps. Include people who shape the culture and involved them in the progress.
  4. ‘Meaningful connectivity’ is the concept that the A4AI had championed — basic access is not enough. The Internet access needs to be at 4G mobile connection, connected with appropriate devices, unlimited broadband, and daily internet use. Not just prescriptive internet bundles — you can access all the content and be able to use it at all times. This is something A4AI had championed to various spaces in the UN, ITU and been working to develop indicators to measure whether the citizens have meaningful connectivity.
  5. Beyond meaningful connectivity, we need to have relevant content, skills etc. for a holistic experience of meaningful connectivity. 
  6. When we apply the meaningful connectivity indicators to countries, it gives a more realistic view — even if people are connected according to the ITU indicators, the quality of the experience is not good — slow Internet, not broadband, not on at all times, limited packages, etc. The gender divide is even wider when we apply meaningful connectivity indicators. Using these indicators, we can challenge the government to see beyond the access.
  7. There are some indicators that cannot be quantitative as they go into the core of our human rights design and embodiments of ICT. This is how mapping gender in ICT laws and spaces can help.
  8. As tech is not neutral and determined by existing power dynamics, there are a set of questions we can ask revolving around who benefits, who decides the process and design, and the possibility of harnessing ICT for social justice. These Qs can help relocate the issue of gender and women’s equal access and use to ICT.
  9. Currently, in policy space we have tried to encapsulate women's rights in ICT, but not the other way around. When we have discourse around women's rights we don’t really try to encapsulate ICT and the applicability of women rights in a digital age. As such, we need to understand the wider landscape of development and the wider promotion of women’s rights and how this intertwines.
  10. We are facing a shortage or lack of disaggregated data to assess digital gender divide and to formulate a gender responsive policy, even in ITU. We also need to look at the data collection processes and practices, the decisions etc. Data is critical as we work for a more persuasive argument towards pursuing policy.
  11. We need to look at gender responsive policy holistically and strategically. Therefore we need to understand how it impacts and shapes lives, and how others derive the benefits from the policy too. All of this comes into account when we develop inclusive policies that look beyond the ICT policy space — which includes community leaders, religious leaders, cultural leaders, etc.
  12. Talking about women in ICT are often limited to executive positions — this is what happens when we don’t challenge the thinking behind governance and decision making. So we tend to overlook the participation of women in all their diversities, especially rural and indigenous women, in governance for ICT. This is reflected in spaces such as the IGF and the WSIS.
  13. The recent case of Facebook outage shows us why we need more feminist, autonomous infrastructure. The concentration of one platform by one tech giant does hamper the question for more feminist autonomous infrastructure that would support women’s movement.
Memorable quotes:

“More than access to the Internet, we need to be able to provide women the quality of experience needed and the safety required to stay online.” – Eleanor

“Tech is not gender neutral but determined by existing power dynamics.” — Marwa

“Even though we have the policy system to enact change, we still need feminist and women's rights organisation movements to resist against so many pushbacks.” — Marwa

October 15 | SESSION 4: Infrastructure is not gender neutral

Facilitated by Erika of APC and Loretto of Radio Word 2006, this session revolved around a provocation — is tech neutral, not just in a gender aspect, but is it neutral in any way? At the end of the session, participants were split into 3 breakout groups to discuss on the future of a feminist, autonomous, communitarian and decolonial structure, and they were invited to think of the elements and values to guide them in creating this infrastructure. 

Key highlights:

    1. On rejecting the terms of experts — when we call ourselves experts in any area, frequently it dismisses the knowledge that everyone else collectively holds. 
    2. When we talk about infrastructure, they are more than just the technical part e.g. mouse, printer, etc. but it also encompasses the human beings behind them that have made infrastructure possible and the relations that shape and are shaped by this infrastructure. Our design of the infrastructure responds to why we are building it, what material, who will have the access and who will not etc. When we build and design infrastructure, it is imprinted with the worldviews that we have, sometimes neglecting others’ (that could lead to many forms of violence). This is why infrastructure can never be neutral. 
    3. We cannot separate technology from the context in which it is born — there's a social and political aspect that's linked to it that leads to power and economic dynamics.
    4. Understanding this, we need to understand how to translate on how infrastructure is managed and governed — what are the rules and norms that allow the infrastructure to work? When it is influenced by these power dynamics and gender-related power dynamics, we can ask: Who is going to make the decisions on how it is governed and how it is used?
    5. Is autonomous technology also neutral? Not quite. An infrastructure may be autonomous, but it is not free from the existing power dynamics. Loreto shared an example on how the arrival of tech in indigenous communities would diminish the amount of control the men have on the women, while women cherish it as a way to keep in touch and to facilitate their daily lives.
    6. Hence, we cannot idealise autonomous infrastructure, we need to consider the worldviews within the feminist movements and decolonisation movements because they are the ones that are going to allow us to make these infrastructures stop reproducing all of these harmful trends. We need to make an effort to have some governance and let women and young women participate in the decision making processes as well.
    7. Margarita Padilla talked about technological sovereignty — the idea of reflecting who has the power over technology, its development and use, access and distribution, oversupply and consumption, prestige and capacity to attract attention. As powers are complicated, she makes us think about how to design and dream the new horizons that we are building as women and in these processes we are involved. 
    8. As facilitators in a community, more than pointing right or wrong, what we should do is build a decentralised and participative model where everyone in the community can have their say. We shall not replicate the current model where some groups of elites would decide over how to build the infrastructure. Try to build a space of participation where women and youth and the elderly and everyone will be able to participate and take part in the decision making and have sovereignty over their data.
    9. We do not need to use fancy terms like data sovereignty, but we need to understand that it's important to generate participatory processes so that we can have essential elements such as consent, privacy, the property of data, security, anonymity etc.
    10.  We need to also take care work into consideration when we talk about processes of building and designing infrastructure, as technical spaces are dominated by men. Women are often relegated to admin and care work, or excluded overall because they are involved in caregiving and house chores, when they are just capable. There’s also this reputation that these care and admin tasks are not as valuable as technical skills, and they are also gendered.
    11. Policy documents often talk about infrastructures as a series of cables and machines — we need to talk more about people behind the infrastructures. 
    12. When we are building infrastructures, we need to also think of the inclusion of extreme users, vulnerable women, and people with disabilities. When we include these communities, automatically it contributes to inclusion in general.
    13. Infrastructure could never be neutral, and we don’t want it to be neutral either! We need it to be transformative for the society that we care about, with feminist intersectional principles in mind.
Memorable quotes:

“Think about how when we are in bodies that intersect many identities, then there are many other considerations that we need to look into.” — Erika

“The big question is — how can this technology allow me to face challenges as big as the climate crisis? How would this allow me to strengthen my local economy? How will this infrastructure strengthen this process of autonomy? When we have all the answers to these questions, hopefully we can have much more appropriate technology that is really ours.” — Loreto

“Because keeping women safe in our patriarchal society is expensive!” — Erika

“How much of the idea that “infrastructure is neutral” is used to serve the capitalists whose main interests are extraction, maintaining the patriarchy, and colonialism as well?” — Erika

“We need to decolonise these spaces so that we can really think and dream about and aspire to having access to a future that is freer.” — Loreto



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