Opinion: How feminist tech can stop online gender-based violence

Nearly half of Gen Z and millennial women have experienced online gender-based violence. For women in public life, the numbers are even more disturbing — for example, 73% of women journalists who responded to a survey conducted by UNESCO and the International Center for Journalists said they have experienced digital violence.

Thanks to the work of feminist activists, how digital harassment — including cyberstalking, nonconsensual sharing of intimate content, doxxing, and violent threats — affects mental health, silences women’s voices, and reinforces patriarchal norms has been discussed for years. What is new, however, is the emerging field of feminist technologies, which is bringing new approaches to ending technology-facilitated gender-based violence, or TFGBV.

While most efforts to counter TFGBV focus on responses, a feminist approach seeks to prevent such violence by challenging and shifting the power dynamics embedded in the design, development, deployment, and delivery of technologies that fuel its occurrence.

This approach goes far beyond pressuring social media companies to implement stronger anti-harassment policies. Feminist technologists call for fundamentally reimagining technology in three critical ways: redefining the role of technology, reconceptualizing how we design and develop it, and rethinking its governance.

This field is growing but nascent, with the first dedicated fund for feminist technology — Numun Fund — founded just three years ago by one of the authors of this piece. Far greater philanthropic investment is needed.

First, we must redefine the role of technology.

Tech is dominated by data-driven corporations that prioritize profits and produce global public bads along with goods. X, formerly known as Twitter, provides a well-known case study of the harms embedded in social media platforms, which are rife with toxic masculinity and algorithms that reward and amplify mobbed and repeated misogynistic content that generates engagement.

Another issue is the role of the large communications companies that own the vast majority of tech infrastructure. For example, four companies control 67% of the world's $130 billion cloud market, and all four are led by male CEOs based in the global north.

To end TFGBV, we must shift the purpose of technology from profit-making to community-making.

Tech should foster the full participation of communities in their political, economic, social, and cultural lives and should not compromise people’s ability to live with dignity and safety.

One of Numun Fund’s grantee-partners AzMina, a feminist group that promotes gender equality and combats GBV, developed the Manual de Fuga, a free digital tool that helps domestic violence survivors in Brazil plan an escape route from their abusers. It is designed to guide women on personal safety and provide legal advice and resources to break free from abusive relationships.

This feminist platform reflects the principle that people should have the right to privacy and safety as fundamental to a digital world that serves the public interest rather than private greed.

Second, we must reconceptualize how we design technology.

White, patriarchal values get encoded into technology design. A feminist approach rejects the bias inherent in technology, including artificial intelligence and content systems, and assesses new technologies for potential harms and injustices. For example, Amazon’s energy-intensive data centers cause serious climate impacts that disproportionately impact the rural, poor, and Indigenous communities where they tend to be based.  

Feminist tech activists, in comparison, center the perspectives of historically marginalized groups, not only because they are the most harmed by technology, but also because they believe that technology should advance justice.

They ask: What would it look like for tech design and development to start with feminist and social justice assumptions instead of the profit motive? Can we design technology with embodied privacy and meaningful consent as the default, rather than extractive data practices? Can we create decentralized social networking platforms that don’t monetize hate and misogyny? What if every new digital technology undergoes a GBV safety audit before coming to market?

Third, we must rethink digital governance to ensure that the people most affected by TFGBV and other harms can inform the decisions that impact their lives.

There are an increasing number of global-level conversations about tech governance — from the Global Digital Compact process to developing shared principles for an open, free, and secure digital future for all to the Group of 20 advanced economies’ digital agenda. While governments and tech companies are engaging in these spaces, the communities that will be impacted by the decisions are too often shut out.

We need to bring down the high barriers to participation that preclude feminist technologists from being able to participate and influence decision-making — from formal barriers such as membership in these bodies to informal barriers like the prohibitive costs of time and money to travel to and participate in governance meetings.

At the national and local levels, governments need to create enabling regulatory environments that allow feminist technologists to dream and design in service to their communities and protect them from Big Tech’s monopolistic behaviors.

From global frameworks to national laws to industry standards, internet governance solutions must be developed in partnership with the communities most affected by TFGBV. To this end, the Feminist Internet Research Network has put forward a comprehensive set of policy recommendations based on research led by communities in the global south.

A feminist approach to technology is crucial to addressing TFGBV, but it does much more than address current harms. It invites us to build an entirely new positive vision of what technology can be in the world.

We need more partners to act now to redistribute power and resources to feminists at the vanguard of reimagining tech. We need philanthropy to invest in this promising new field in ways that create space for feminist techies to dream, play, imagine, and create together. It is time to reclaim technology for the people and turn it into a global public good, one that advances gender equality and creates inclusive, equitable, and safe spaces for all.

Visit Ctrl Shift Equality — a series produced by Devex in partnership with UN Women and the Generation Equality Action Coalitions on Technology and Innovation for Gender Equality, and Gender-Based Violence.

To learn more about the multi-stakeholder commitments made to the Generation Equality Action Coalitions, click here.

The Ford Foundation has made a commitment under ACT&I to support the Numun Fund. Find out more about the commitment here.