gender and technology

Open-source advocate from the region, Zaatar, makes the case for digital self-defence to support sexual rights and reproductive justice movements amidst growing crackdowns and threats. She elaborates on use of secure and protective technologies to share and access information critical to feminist movements.

AI expert, Nour Naim from Gaza, details the particular challenges of gender and racial bias in algorithms and datasets. In her piece, she presents an overview of important and emerging trends in the movement for trustworthy AI, as well as activist responses to these inequalities.

Tunisian researcher, Afef Abrougui, writes about the perils of AI-enhanced technologies deployed by authoritarian regimes in the region towards increased surveillance and predictive policing. She raises important questions about the readiness of civil society in the MENA to respond to these dangers and what is needed to preserve privacy and human rights in the coming…

For a region like the MENA (which some authors refer to as S/WANA, others as Arabic-speaking countries), tech policy problems are compounded with a litany of daily struggles, most devastating of these being occupation, war, conflict, and displacement which affects, we sometimes forget, two billion people - a quarter of the world’s population. People Like Us are often…

Technology is constantly evolving everyday, with new advancements in models like artificial intelligence that on one hand claims to help humans in making tasks easy, but on the other hand, it reinforces harmful societal stereotypes. In this article, Beatrix Kondo explores the portrayal of gender through AI in pop culture and how it has been seen in still-new AI chatbots.

Derechos Digitales maps cases involving the abusive use of cybercrime regulation to silence and criminalise women and LGBTQIA+ people worldwide. The results are troubling and warn of the inherent danger of imposing international standards without considering national contexts or building human rights safeguards, particularly for historically marginalised groups.

This edition focuses on the human dimension of cybersecurity. To do this, the editors asked themselves how cybersecurity policies developed from the centres of political, economic and epistemological power affect those at the margins; and how they can think about cybersecurity from a feminist perspective. The editors set out to find specific and contextualised examples of how cybersecurity…

The international forensic community still fails to develop tools and techniques to address women’s needs. Carl, from Marialab, explores how feminist activists in Brazil are working on frameworks for teaching and applying computer forensics in cases of gender-based violence online.

Our perspectives and conditions of access, use and development of technologies are deeply rooted in the ways patriarchy, capitalism and colonialism are embedded in our daily lives. This article maps pioneering feminist infrastructure experiences that allow us to explore new horizons of political action.

Nicaraguas’ Cybercrime Special Law, passed under the argument of being the first national instrument to protect women’s and children’s integrity online, is being enforced to silence dissenting voices. This article illustrates how the Ortega-Murillo regime has instrumentalised this bill to curtail freedom of expression, criminalise human rights defenders and silence feminist activists in the…