GenderIT.org, Feminist reflection on ICT policies
In the 2013 Global Information Society Watch’s institutional overview entitled Whose internet is it anyway? Shaping the internet – feminist voices in governance decision making, Heike Jensen calls the attention to the hegemonic framing of issues and agendas in the internet governance field. “Any mainstream political agenda of issues already represents the outcome of power struggles among groups of privileged men, and the outcome of the subsequent policy debate largely reflects which groups of men have achieved dominance, or in gendered terms, which groups of men now represent hegemonic masculinity.”
These processes of agenda setting and framing successfully serve to alienate many women, and keep them from entering the political process, and prevent them from immediately seeing how those issues connect to their own lived realities or the political issues they find most critical. Women’s ability to set the agenda is key to internet governance, and it relates to a power relation which we constantly work to subvert with GenderIT.org. It is also a key outcome of this year’s GISWatch, the focus of this GenderIT.org edition: setting women’s agenda and exploring and showcasing how ICT issues “connect to lived realities [of diverse group of women] or the political issues they find most critical.”