In July 2024, Amnesty Tech and Amnesty Netherlands hosted an event to explore the intersection of tech, gender, and inequality in Amsterdam.
The “Exploring Intersectionality” event brought together more than 80 activists, practitioners and researchers from different organisations working in the technology and human rights field.
With digital gender-based violence on the rise and technology profoundly affecting equitable access to economic, social, and cultural rights for women and LGBTI people, we felt that holding space for civil society groups to engage in informed discussions, actions, and collectively strategise on how to defend and promote human rights was critical. Various panels and speeches at the half-day gathering highlighted key trends and challenges across the intersection of gender and technology.
Women and LGBTI groups who have historically faced gender-based discrimination, and people living at the intersection of other forms of marginalisation, such as racialised people, ethnic and religious minorities, people living with disabilities, and people living in poverty, are especially impacted by the harms arising from or facilitated by technologies.
Our aim was therefore to promote a deliberately intersectional approach, which sees gender-based discrimination as inherently tied to other forms of discrimination, to be able to adequately address this challenge.
Amnesty International’s briefing on Gender, Tech and Inequality was also launched at the event. It is a primer on key areas including social protection, online activism, surveillance and labour rights, and spotlights emerging risks to the rights of and LGBTI people in digital environments, as well as how these risks intersect with other forms of discrimination.
Key takeaways from panels and speeches
The event began with a welcome address from Amnesty Netherland’s Senior Director for Research, Advocacy, and Strategy, Merel Koning, whose presentation honed in on two pervasive trends: firstly, that the ‘code’ underpinning our everyday technologies is acting as law and secondly, that technology is not neutral.
What this means in practice is that often discrimination is embedded into the logics of technologies. These logics mirror inequalities that already exist in our society. For example, in the Netherlands, algorithmic systems lead to human rights violations and automated profiling ends in discrimination and in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT), facial recognition technology is used extensively by the Israeli authorities to facilitate their continued domination and oppression of Palestinians.
Better regulation, monitoring and enforcement at the national and international level is necessary so that Artificial Intelligence technologies may be used to protect human rights rather than to violate them.
Moderator: Bárbara Paes – The Engine Room (left)
Panellists (top to bottom, left to right):
- Panusaya Sithijirawattanakul “Rung” – United Front of Thammasat and Demonstration (online)
- Luísa Franco Machado – United Nations Young Leader for the SDGs
- Celia Davies – Moonshot
- Rebecca White – Amnesty International
Our first panel of the day focused on resisting technology-facilitated gender-based violence (TfGBV). TfGBV refers to the range of ways that different types of technology are being used to cause particular kinds of harm to women, girls and LGBTI people, such as online harassment, doxing, and targeted surveillance.
Digital tools provide a crucial space for woman, girls and LGBTI people to gather, share information, give visibility to issues that are structurally silenced, in order to mobilise, and protest. However, these same tools can be used to inflict TfGBV.
Panusaya “Rung” Sithijirawattanakul, a prominent activist in Thailand for whom the digital space has been crucial to carry out her work, shared her first-hand experience of online sexual harassment, smear campaigns and targeted surveillance, and how these forms of TfGBV impacted her human rights, activism, and mental health.
The panel identified crucial actions needed to end TfGBV and protect woman, girls and LGBTI activists, which included the need to understand of the root causes of TfGBV and how different forms of oppression combine to further exacerbate the impacts of TfGBV. For example, the panel discussed how women in Thailand were targeted with spyware not because they were women, but because they were human rights defenders. But the impacts that they felt once targeted were compounded by their gender identity.
Moderator: Likhita Banerji – Amnesty International (left)
Panellists (top to bottom, left to right):
- Angella Kasule Nabwowe – ISER-Uganda (online)
- Ouassima Laabich – Superrr Lab
- Nađa Marcović – A11 Initiative Serbia
- Imogen Richmond-Bishop – Amnesty International
Our second panel focused on the gendered impacts of technologies on economic, social, and cultural rights. Technology is created without considering impacts on marginalised groups and this leads to decision making that, at best, does not respond to their needs, and at worst, further entrenches their marginalisation. For example, in Uganda, a Digital ID system with a centralized database was introduced in 2014 and is a pre-requisite for accessing public services. However, many errors in the system have led to a mass exclusion of over 17 million people who became ineligible for social services, particularly those from the most marginalized communities.
In Serbia, errors in data used by the semi-automated social card registry have led thousands of people being denied the social assistance they need, especially women and single mothers. Mass surveillance and digital policing also pose serious threats.
In this context, the panel deliberated how we could go from merely reacting to more proactive strategies. The need to incorporate futures thinking and imagining positive and decolonised futures was recognised as an important strategy for resistance.
Addressing human rights violations through strategic litigation and creating conditions for public participation in accountability fora was another way in which panellists were responding to these threats in their work. However, the panel reflected on the need for a multiplicity of strategies to achieve lasting positive change.
The event closed with remarks from Damini Satija (Director, Amnesty Tech), where she reflected on how technologies are key for connection, access, mobilisation and resistance for women, girls and LGBTI people, but they are also weaponised against these marginalised communities and intensify much of the oppression they already face in their lives. This tension is not accidental, as the vision underpinning technological progress has typically been driven and defined by a small homogenous group of people. Throughout technological history, we can trace the erasure of marginalised people, as well as active gender stereotyping and violence driving the very design of new technologies. And yet, these technologies are also being hailed as tools for representation and democratised access.
Damini argued that only an intersectional approach, which sees gender-based discrimination as inherently tied to racism and other forms of discrimination, will be able to adequately address this challenge. Technology is entrenching and exacerbating the pre-existing inequalities and marginalisation experienced by women and LGBTI people. For example, facial recognition technologies are less accurate on women than men, and least accurate for darker skinned women. As generative AI systems, such as ChatGPT, are entering the market, we see new manifestations of these issues. Our actions as a community have to span the full spectrum of interventions and influence points at our disposal:
- Securing rights-respecting regulation;
- Shaping technology development in its earliest stages and using other such avenues which allow us to pre-emptively curtail the incursion of technologies with disproportionate impacts on those marginalised for their gender identities;
- Continue exposing and investigating technology’s gendered impacts to hold powerful actors to account where harms have already happened, with and for the communities impacted;
Ultimately, giving space and power to those with marginalised gender identities to articulate visions of the technological futures they wish to see and amplifying those visions such that they actually influence the direction of travel is critical to co-creating just futures.
We want to share our sincere thanks to all event participants and partners for bringing their energy and questions to an exciting discussion on tech and intersectionality, and a special thanks to Limelight Foundation for their support in making this event possible.