The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) recently hosted its second biennial Forum on Gender Equality. While the inaugural forum in 2024 examined the impact of the green, energy and digital transitions on women, this year’s meeting focused squarely on technology.
The shift reflects growing concern about AI-driven decision-making in employment and healthcare, the proliferation of deepfakes and other forms of technology-facilitated gender-based violence (TF-GBV) and the broader implications of these developments for gender equality.
It would be fair to question whether this multilateral forum could move beyond its optimistically titled two-day meeting – “harnessing the digital transformation for all”. Governments globally are trying to respond to the challenges posed by AI, yet technology continues to evolve faster than policymaking itself. As Stéphanie Lachat, Co-Director of Switzerland’s Federal Office for Gender Equality observed, regulating technology can feel like trying to catch a train that has already left the station. The challenge posed by AI for gender equality is not technological alone. It is a test of whether law and regulation can keep pace with innovation.
The Regulatory Dilemma
The first notable takeaway is the difficulty for governments to manage AI’s risks while capturing its benefits. Many equality ministers highlighted the potential of AI-enabled public services and how women entrepreneurs are drivers of digital innovation. France is using AI to detect discrimination in public-sector job advertisements; Norway is paying newspapers for access to their texts to develop Norwegian and Sámi language models; while Canada is investing in Tulong AI, a Filipino-Canadian collaboration to create more culturally intelligent systems using multilingual and cultural data. AI is also enabling faster healthcare decision-making in relation to cardiovascular disease and breast cancer detection and creating new opportunities for women-led businesses.
Yet governments appeared just as conscious of the need to regulate against AI’s harms – though less certain how. Digital violence against women remains widespread, limiting women’s participation online. Women in politics are particularly exposed to TF-GBV, defined by the United Nations as any act committed, assisted, aggravated or amplified through the use of technology. Parents are also increasingly burdened with keeping children safe online, an issue particularly felt by women who continue to bear the greater responsibility for care.
These challenges are unfolding at a moment when faith in the steady march of gender equality is beginning to waver. As French Minister for Equality between Women and Men and the Fight against Discrimination Aurore Bergé warned, digital violence is “an organised discourse” that risks destabilising not only women’s rights but democratic institutions themselves. TF-GBV was repeatedly framed as more than a women’s issue. When women are driven from public life due to online violence, our democracies become less representative—and everyone loses.
The Race to Regulate
Many countries want to be seen at the forefront of regulation. The second risk emerging from the Forum is that laws are rushed, replicated and celebrated before there is evidence they work.
Australia was notably absent from the room, despite its proposed digital duty of care and Prime Minister Albanese’s newly-announced plans for an AI framework for Australia. The absence was also surprising given the joint statement issued in June by Foreign Minister Penny Wong and UK Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper committing to combat gender-based violence online and offline. Communications Minister Anika Wells delivered a pre-recorded address highlighting Australia’s social media ban for under-16s and the parental concerns that drove it. Yet the policy is already attracting international scrutiny amid emerging evidence that it is not achieving its intended effect.
Against that backdrop, it was concerning to hear France—a country that seemed keen to lead the race to regulate—pursuing a social media ban for under-15s (if it can do so while complying with the EU’s Digital Services Act), alongside similar proposals by the United Kingdom, Finland and Germany. By contrast, Ireland, Poland and the Slovak Republic appeared content to learn from developments elsewhere. South Korea sits somewhere in between, with ambitious policies and a newly-announced Inter-Agency Department on AI-related crimes, but gaps that still hinder the realisation of their benefits.
A recurring theme throughout the forum was that responsibility for online safety cannot rest primarily with parents and young people. Whether Australia’s social media ban achieves that objective remains open to question. If governments are serious about reducing online harms, accountability must be pushed back onto the platforms themselves—the very actors who were largely absent from the Paris debates.
Rethinking the Narrative
In this regulatory environment, both law and policy require a different narrative. UNESCO Deputy Director-General Åsa Regnér balked at the fact that women are powerhouses, yet we remain stuck in conversations about training women to use AI.
The conversation clearly demands more nuance. While raised as an issue, according to OECD data, the gender gap in AI use is just 4.2 per cent. The much larger divide is generational: 53.6 per cent separates users aged 55–74 from those aged 16–24. This raises a question for regulators: how well do often much older policymakers understand the behaviours and attitudes of the young people whose digital lives they seek to govern?
The same is true of men and masculinities. As Kevin McCarthy, Ireland’s Secretary General of the Department of Children, Disability and Equality observed, we cannot speak only of toxic masculinity or view men and boys solely as perpetrators. Nor should we assume that the answer lies simply in promoting more positive forms of masculinity.
Doing so requires recognising the broader context in which many young men live today. War, economic uncertainty and social change can increase vulnerability to provocative, divisive and emotionally charged content. Gender equality cannot be achieved by speaking only to women, nor by treating men and boys solely as part of the problem. Effective regulation must address harmful behaviours and content, but it must also reckon with the social and economic anxieties that make some young men susceptible to them in the first place.
Where to Next?
There is much to do: retain women in Information Communications Technology, ensure their experiences shape policy design and learn from what works rather than repeating mistakes.
However, much of the discussion focused on adaptation—how women need to develop new skills and how we help parents keep children safe online. Less attention was paid to accountability: how governments can regulate the companies that design, deploy and profit from technologies that can deepen existing inequalities.
Recent history suggests technology companies rarely act beyond what is required of them. We cannot build an intelligent future that is also an equal one without placing greater responsibility on those who design, deploy and profit from these technologies. Legislation must create incentives for good practice, regulate design where necessary and be backed by meaningful enforcement. Otherwise, we risk mistaking regulation for progress—and papering over a profound challenge with little more than legalese.
Professor Ramona Vijeyarasa is the inaugural Chair in Gender and the Law at the University of Technology Sydney. A leading expert on gender and legal systems, she pioneered the Gender Legislative Index, a ground-breaking human driven, machine learning enabled tool that assesses the gender-responsiveness of legislation. Prof. Vijeyarasa’s attendance at the OECD Gender Equality Forum was enabled by generous funding received by the Minderoo Foundation.
This article is published under a Creative Commons License and may be republished with attribution.
