Agenda

Efforts to expand access to technology are accelerating. More women and girls are being encouraged to participate, build skills, and enter emerging fields. But safety is not keeping pace.

This session challenges a common assumption: that inclusion alone leads to empowerment. For many women, girls, and gender-diverse people, increased access without safety, representation, and influence is creating new forms of harm.

Automation is driving this shift. Systems built to optimise engagement and efficiency also shape exposure, behaviour, and risk. They interact with existing inequalities and amplify them at scale. A teenager drawn into escalating content through recommendation systems. A woman facing harassment as she builds visibility online. A person with disability denied essential funding by a standardised assessment, the risk then displaced onto an unpaid carer, almost always a woman. The pattern is consistent. Harm is not random. It is shaped, repeated, and intensified by systems that learn faster than safeguards can adapt.

Relevant work

This session draws on a sustained body of delivery, not a single project. Across UN CSW70, the SHIELD global online safety conference, the IPPPRI international child protection conference, and recent workshops in Australia, we have worked through the specific harms this session names: technology-facilitated gender-based violence, child online exploitation and escalating content, digital overload and its mental health toll, and the way disconnection and isolation make women more vulnerable online.

Our current research extends this into automated care systems, where AI-shaped decisions can act as digital gatekeepers, automating coercive control by denying funding for housing or transport autonomy, and where culturally and linguistically diverse women are systematically unseen by models that lack their context. In April 2026 we facilitated a multinational consultation toward a declaration on technology-facilitated gender-based violence, with participants from thirteen countries, and we contribute to the IEEE Industry Connections activity on AI and family violence.

Vision

WSIS built two decades of progress on access and infrastructure. The unfinished work is safety and accountability. Our vision for WSIS beyond the twenty-year review is straightforward: inclusion efforts must not increase harm.

That means embedding safety into system design, making accountability measurable and enforceable, and recognising compounding risk, where vulnerabilities do not simply add up but multiply. It means shifting from reacting after harm to preventing it, and asking where responsibility sits when harm is predictable.

This session introduces compounding risk as a practical lens and moves the conversation from access to safe, meaningful participation. Inclusion is the starting point. Safety is what makes it real.