IGF 2020 BPF Gender and Access

Time
Friday, 13th November, 2020 (11:20 UTC) - Friday, 13th November, 2020 (12:50 UTC)
Room
Room 2
About this Session
The session will look at (1) whether and how issues related to violence, harm, pleasure and consent online (from a gender-diversity perspective) have been brought up at the IGF and (2) whether and how the IGF has fostered the participation of women and gender-diverse people.

Since its beginning in 2015, the Best Practice Forum (BPF) on Gender and Access (in short, BPF Gender) has focused on different aspects of women’s meaningful access to the Internet: online abuse and gender-based violence (2015); barriers for accessing the Internet (2016); identification of the needs and challenges of diverse women’s groups with respect to Internet access (2017); the impact of supplementary models of connectivity on women’s Internet access (2018) were the topics addressed by the community; and opportunities and challenges that women face to get the necessary skills to benefit from the future of work. During these years, the BPF Gender has worked in a bottom-up process that allowed it to collect, from diverse stakeholders, valuable data and anecdotal evidence of the challenges that formed the digital gender gap.

In 2020, the BPF has chosen violence, harm, pleasure and consent online (from a gender-diversity perspective) as its thematic focus, and looked at how these issues have been brought up at the IGF between 2016 and 2019. For this, we carried out an analysis of IGF sessions (sessions descriptions, reports and transcripts), ran a public survey, conducted a series of interviews with members of the IGF community, and collected insights from contributions submitted into the IGF taking stock processes.

During the BPF session at IGF 2020, we will discuss the key insights from the research we conducted and look at whether the recommendations provided by the BPF are applicable to other Internet governance fora.

The BPF draft report is available for public comment. Please visit the BPF page for details on how to submit your feedback. 

Speakers

  • Jennifer Chung - Dot.Asia
  • Avri Doria - Technicalities 
  • Koliwe Majama - Association for Progressive Communications
  • Anri van der Spuy - Research ICT Africa
  • Sorina Teleanu IGF Secretariat consultant

Moderators

  • Marwa Azelmat, BPF co-facilitator
  • Bruna Martins dos Santos, BPF co-facilitator
2. Summary of Issues Discussed

The session tackled the subject of gender at the IGF with a thematic focus on violence, harm, pleasure, and consent. Results from the report put together by the BPF were shared, along with the survey methodology. Overall, the findings show that gender issues tend to be discussed mostly in conjunction with the issue of access and there is a lack of disaggregated data for gender-diverse participants. There was also broad discussion on approaching gender and consent issues online with more positive framing to foster empowerment and focus on subjects such as pleasure. Lastly, speakers and participants also discussed whether a feminist discussion should be included or delineated from the gender and access discourse.

A recurring issue that was raised during the session is the continued silos of various gender subjects at the IGF. Speakers in the session stressed the need to involve more discussions on solutions to gender issues from a policy level in order to make progress on the subject matter. Repeated various speakers also brought up the matter of expanding beyond the UN and the IGF to reaching out to broader communities to instigate lasting change and empower women and gender diverse people. In terms of data, there is overall consensus that more needs to be collected and better disaggregated.

3. Key Takeaways

The session underlined the need to distinguish between gender representation and empowered participation. Although women participants and speakers at the IGF have seen a rise over the past few years, there is still more work to be done in regards to agency. Women and gender-diverse individuals need to be encouraged to actively participate and bring forth specific discussions at the IGF; their participation should not be tokenised, nor should it stop at a simple contribution to a session. Proactive efforts to collect more data is required. Going forward, it would be worthwhile to bring forth more discussions on pleasure and consent from a gender diversity perspective. There is also strong recommendation that the IGF make a conscious effort to include regional and local expertise on gender into this policy space.

7. Reflection to Gender Issues

The session was about gender at the IGF and in other policy spaces, therefore gender issues were the focus.