I was invited to speak at a webinar on “The digital economy in Asia: feminist perspectives” organized by the Women and future of work working group of Friedrich Ebert Stiftung in Asia, in cooperation with WIDE+ on 22nd April. This webinar provided an interesting and much-needed discussion on how feminism in the Fourth Industrial Revolution is impacting the present and future of women’s work in Asian economies. The kinds of issues we discussed was about the gender digital divide and implications of platformisation and automation of value chains on women’s work and livelihoods, to reflect on future priorities for feminist action in the region. I enjoyed the back and forth discussion mediated by Farzana Nawaz, at Laudes Foundation in Bangkok, between myself, Anita Gurumurthy, IT for Change, India, Nadine Siregard, Gojek, Indonesia and Verna Dinah Viajar, Postdoctoral Researcher, University of the Philippines Diliman studying labour issues and the future of work.
In my opening statement, I tried to steer away from the gender-divide framing, reminding the audience of the age of problematization of the divide discourse that implicates an evolutionary and deterministic direction. I also spoke about the feminist data dilemmas along the lines of misrepresentation as deliberate vs imposed obfuscation where women’s dominance in sectors such as agriculture, construction, and other such markets are masked as the popular trope of these fields being masculine circulate in the media and policy reports. This is partly due to the subsistence and collective/cooperative models of sustainability that women choose over that of market driven. In the COVID times, this makes them invisible and ineligible for bailouts, creating further inequality between the sexes. I also talk about the value of privacy versus the amplification of voice being the perennial and hard to resolve tensions that women grapple with especially in this datafication age. Overall, I advocate for shifting focus from the user to the design of socio-technical systems if we are to move forward towards a more just society.
Payal Arora 