18 Nov 2024 The Global Digital Compact – an “add and stir gender” déjà vu?

Anita Gurumurthy and Nandini Chami

The Global Digital Compact upholds “gender equality and the empowerment of all women and girls and their full, equal and meaningful participation” as a core principle for digital cooperation [para 8(d)]. The extraordinary complexity of our times, which the digital phenomenon has only intensified, requires us to unpack this aspirational goal by looking more closely at the nuts and bolts of the Compact. In a world of stark inequalities, gender justice is often about locating the lost intersections, the invisible oppressions that tend to slip through policy formalese.

The Compact’s section-specific references to gender echo demands that feminist digital rights activists have been making for more than 20 years. These are important references to structural and systematic barriers that impede meaningful, safe, and affordable connectivity for all women and girls [para 11(g)], targeted digital capacity-building for women and girls [para 13(c)], and furthering women’s and girls’ inclusion in STEM education and research[para 13(h)]. Similarly, there is a recognition of “gender data divides”, in the section on data exchanges and standards [para 40] and an exhortation to promote “women’s entrepreneurship” through MSMEs and digital start-ups [para 21(i)].

The language and analysis strike the right chord, wrapped neatly in gender wokeness characteristic of “check-box” politics that we are all familiar with today.

Yet, the vision and path for feminist digital justice – the structural and systemic conditions for a better digital paradigm, one that can allow women and girls (and indeed non-binary people that the text ignores) to become agentic actors in the digital society and economy – are not really evident in the rest of the text. The Compact cannot potentially pivot gender justice unless its vectors of transformation – commitments that work to eliminate inequality – are discernible.

The GDC’s status quoism leaves the injustices of the digital economy intact. While early drafts did hint at possible financing commitments for digital infrastructural finance, the Compact finally relies only on failed market mechanisms in this regard. This means the public right to access (the benefits of technology) and voice (in the tech paradigm), sadly, remains unavailable to the most marginalised women. The rights of women labouring in global AI value chains falls back on appeals to corporate responsibility – a route that has so far yielded no guarantees for the rights of workers and producers in the South routinely exploited in the platform economy.

Text to “counter and address all forms of violence, including sexual and gender-based violence” [para 30] evades corresponding reference to obligations and liabilities of powerful entities who profiteer from the unbridled circulation of misogynistic content in the algorithmic environments they engineer. The section on information integrity [paras 33 to 35] adopts a noticeably innocent tone – calling upon companies for “transparency” to enable users to provide “informed consent” in a digital services economy that is evidently dominated by a handful of powerful firms that render real choice a farce.

The Compact’s dissonance between its ideals and actions results in a serious blind spot; gender justice and human rights are decoupled from their normative foundations in global justice. Its conception of human rights — which focuses on user protection in the lifecycle of digital technologies [para 22] – overlooks the digital structures perpetuating deeply gendered and oppressive arrangements.

The dots that trace back the (de)generative AI economy of knowledge enclosures, human precarity and loss of social autonomy to gendered origins remain invisible. What this obscures is the political economy of rare earth mining, e-commerce logistics, remote farming etc., that disenfranchises women from the South, erasing their productive and reproductive labour that digital capitalism feeds on.

The Global Digital Compact seems yet another instance of the empty policy motions of “gender mainstreaming” that only streams gender away. Where do we go from here? As the DAWN-IT for Change Working Group’s Declaration on Feminist Digital Justice (2023) asserts – “We must claim the values of a new sociality that can repoliticize data, resignify intelligence and recreate digital architectures in a networked co-existence of planetary flourishing.” We must work with a normative compass that retains the ever-evolving political edge of feminism, even as we engage with self-reflexivity in the technicalised protocols of policy making.

The WSIS+20 review could be a space to introduce an action line for gender justice. The upcoming Beijing +30 review process is another occasion to galvanize actions for substantive equality in the data and AI epoch. The Compact is a hard reminder that a world free from gender discrimination, a world of freedom, is not given to us; it is always the precious reward of struggle.

Anita Gurumurthy is Executive Director and Nandini Chami is Deputy Director and Fellow – Research & Policy Engagement of IT for Change.