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No tech company in the world would want to be left in the cold as the artificial intelligence (AI) race sweeps every region, as tech giants and start-ups alike rush to launch their own AI models built on quietly purchased training data.
But the excitement over generative AI – hailed as one of the greatest disruptors in history – could also be playing to the exploitative side of Big Tech. Indeed, as the industry looks to outsource data labeling work needed to spruce up its AI models, thousands of women from the Global South are likely to be used to make it happen.
It’s a scenario that is all too familiar. For decades, the “nimble-fingers” premise had prompted factories across the world to hire women for cheap, and indications are that it’s not going to be too much different in the age of AI. As late as 2019, an investigation found that over 400 women in an all-female facility in India were supplying major information technology (IT) companies with rote data-labeling work at wages lower than their Western counterparts – a type of labor that Madhumita Murgia, current AI editor of Financial Times, has described as the “vanguard of artificial intelligence.”
But as companies look to perfect their AI technology on the back of cheap, mainly female labor, women-led startups in Asia want to carve a different story: one that reclaims women’s agency in the face of technological advancement by responding to problems that international tech companies never could.
“The tech that we need challenges prevailing power structures and centers historically excluded, oppressed or discriminated communities and peoples,” said Syar S. Alia of the Numun Fund during a November 2023 webinar held by the digital-rights nonprofit EngageMedia on feminist technology in Asia. “[It] forefronts priority issues affecting these communities and peoples [and] is grounded in social justice movements and those most affected, and is feminist.”
Alia added that the main premise of feminist technology aims to unpack some of the most pervasive systems of gender-based inequality, which can then allow others to see “intersecting inequalities based on race, class, colonialism, ability, and more.”
The boys’ club in tech
Numun Fund on its website says that “there is not a single definition” for feminist technology, although it says that at heart it is about “shifting power, an engagement with tech as a site for activism.”
Advocates of feminist technology, meanwhile, have diverse views about its goals. Still, the most common perspective is that no technology is free from bias; everything from modern appliances to algorithms has been shaped by the dominant gender, race, and class of its designers.
Feminist-technology advocates are thus typically skeptical of Big Tech for its excessive, monopoly-like control over people’s data and reliance on precarious labor conditions, including the exploitation of gig workers and subcontracted employees, who are often disproportionately women.
This is undoubtedly the case in Asia, where massive technological growth has positioned the region as a hotbed for innovation, but has men predominantly leading the charge.
According to a survey conducted from 2016 to 2022, the start-up ecosystem in Asia continues to be heavily male-dominated, with only 14.9 percent of founders being women. This places Asia behind Oceania (21.6 percent) and North America (15.7 percent).
At the same time, in Southeast Asia, women currently account for 32 percent of the subregion’s tech sector workforce – higher than the global average of 28 percent, according to a 2020 study (data for Asia as a whole were not immediately available).
This echoes the global trend in which women in tech are kept out of positions of power. In truth, even as women make up a third of the workforce of the 20 biggest tech companies in the world, only one out of four holds a leadership position. Across all industries, women are also more likely to be working in jobs that have the highest chance of being replaced with generative AI, such as administrative support and data entry, according to research by Goldman Sachs.
When it comes to funding for tech start-ups, estimates by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development indicate that women-owned start-ups get at least 23 percent less funding than male-owned businesses.
Again in Southeast Asia, the tech-trend tracker Traxcn says that in 2023, funding for women-led tech start-ups even dropped 42 percent compared to that of the previous year. Traxcn also says that such start-ups barely make up five percent of the “overall tech funding pie” in the subregion.
The community as focus
The good news is that at least one of tech’s major players is taking notice. Last year, Google launched a fund for women founders of AI start-ups in India, South Korea, and Japan “to help level the playing field…and build more equitable AI products for the world.” Of the seven initial recipients of grants of US$100,000 each, three headed health-related ventures.
Besides women’s participation in the labor force and presence in the C-suite in tech firms, though, proponents of feminist technology also aim to address the deep digital divides that have left thousands of women without access to the Internet.
Even as Asia has seen a technological boom, only 54 percent of women in the Asia-Pacific region use the Internet, compared with 59 percent of men, according to the United Nations.
In many cases, societal prejudice and backward social norms are responsible for limiting women’s access to the Net and even owning a mobile device.
In Afghanistan, where women’s fundamental freedoms have been drastically reduced since the Taliban takeover in 2021, just six percent of women reported having access to the Internet compared to 25 percent of men, according to a 2022 survey. Overall, just 15 percent of Afghans have access to the Internet due to poor digital infrastructure and lack of reliable electricity.
In India, where patriarchy similarly runs deep, women make up only a third of all Net users, making the South Asian nation have the worst online gender gap in the region at 40 percent, according to a 2022 report by Oxfam India.
For this reason, one of the core advocacies being pushed by feminist-technology advocates is the proliferation of community networks, or self-organized Internet infrastructure that allows people in rural communities to gain online access using digital infrastructure seen as less profitable by Internet service providers and corporations.
These are ideally self-organized infrastructures designed to be “open, free, neutral, often relying on shared values, resources and shared management using bottom-up approaches,” according to Feminist Action Lab, a collaborative project by feminists raising awareness about feminist technology.
A small but dedicated group of women in Channapatna, a town in India 70 kms southwest of Bangalore, the center of the country’s high-tech industry, are working to share their archive of health knowledge and practices with the community through the same type of crowdsourced, self-managed, and low-cost wireless network.
The Channapatna Health Library (CHL) started by training five women in the town to raise awareness on preventing and managing chronic conditions, like hypertension and diabetes. The program has since grown to include over two dozen “health navigators” who provide services for the testing and management of chronic disease while building a community-led digital repository of the town’s health practices
“As we expanded our group to 20-25 women health navigators, we started observing differences between health and traditional food practices of older people, who seemed to be healthier than us,” said Muni Ramakka, field coordinator of non-government organization MAYAHealth, during the EngageMedia webinar. MAYAHealth is the group behind the training of the health navigators.
Still a whole lot of catching up left
Since 2014, CHL has been providing door-to-door health services in a town with an estimated population of 70,000, half of whom are women.
But it was during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2021 that the health navigators, along with Design Beku, a group that supports NGOs with their expertise in design and technology, started to build a community-owned local health knowledge repository through a community wireless network and a “feminist server.”
The concept of a feminist server rests on the idea of storing data on technology that is not owned by corporations, to regain control and autonomy over the collection and management of data.
Currently, the repository has about 200 items of community knowledge and experience.
“We thought if we collect information about the health of our own communities, it will be beneficial for all of us and the next generations,” Ramakka said.
Yet for all their efforts, feminist-technology advocates know that far more needs to be done.
At the EngageMedia webinar, Alia shared that when they opened applications for their first seed grant call in July 2022, more than half of the 800 eligible applications submitted focused on safety and freedom from violence, followed by access to technology and gender disparities, and knowledge building and right to information.
Alia added that the Numun Fund was able to fund only five percent of the applications, or just 43. The number is “pitiful,” she said, but also indicative of a “large unmet need” for feminist technology in the region.
“When you think about people like Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Bill Gates, when you think about the millions and billions that go into Silicon Valley, Silicon savannahs, China’s tech industry and mainstream tech, this seems like such a drop in the ocean and it’s so needed,” Alia said.
The future of feminist technology, she said, should include intersectional work that reaches directly to people and activists on the ground, as well as projects that aim to address issues with less focus such as alternative economies and technology, privacy, climate justice and environmental sustainability,
With several long-standing issues affecting women and children, Alia said that the typical approach of funding projects for a few years can lead to “disruptions in the work of movement building.”
“We need to seed what is emerging, not just what we’re used to, what we’re constantly seeing,”she said. “Funding should follow the movement and we should fund in ways that we know support movements.”
Asserted Alia: “We need funding that doesn’t shift in funding priorities, that isn’t dictated by the people that have the money and the resources, but is driven by the people on the ground and what they think is needed for change and transformation within their own local contexts.” ◉