Digital and new, emerging technologies offer significant opportunities to advance the rights of women and girls, yet they also present new risks. Every new tool and technology has the potential to promote women’s participation in the digital sphere, providing new avenues for communication, coordination and community building. However, these same technologies bear risks, for the safety of women and girls, for the exacerbation of existing structures of inequality, and for the further polarisation of an increasingly online world into silos which perpetuate harmful gender stereotypes.
In this context, the International Gender Champions and the Geneva Graduate Institute hosted their 6th Geneva Gender Debate. Every year, this event aims to promote dialogue and highlight barriers that need to be addressed to achieve gender equality through the art of debate. In the tradition of the Oxford Union Debates, this year’s motion was: “This house believes that digital and new emerging technologies are catalysts for accelerating gender equality.” To watch the full recording of the debate, please visit this link.
The opening remarks were given by the Executive Director of the Gender Centre and Professor of Gender at the Geneva Graduate Institute, Dr. Claire Somerville. She highlighted the difficult moment in the world that 2025 presented for gender equality, including the additional complication of new technologies. Dr. Somerville also cited the risks posed by online gender-based violence as an example of patriarchy and misogyny in action in the digital sphere, while acknowledging the simultaneous opportunity provided by technology to advance gender equality.
ITU Secretary-General Doreen Bogdan-Martin provided virtual opening remarks. She focused on the impact of artificial intelligence (AI) on women, noting that only 22% of workers in AI and less than 14% of senior leadership in AI firms are women. She urged participants to ensure that “technology serves as a bridge, not a barrier, to a safe, inclusive and equitable future.”
The debate was moderated by Geneva Graduate Institute’s Naomi Samake-Bäckert, a PhD student in the International History and Politics Department.
Debaters assigned to argue in favour of the motion were:
- Sameer Chauhan, Director, United Nations International Computing Centre
- Caitlin Kraft-Buchman, CEO / Founder, Women@TheTable, Co-Founder of International Gender Champions
Debaters assigned to argue against the motion were:
- Itonde Kakoma, President/CEO, Interpeace
- Rita French, Executive Fellow, Geneva Centre for Security Policy (GCSP), and former UK Human Rights Ambassador
UNICC Director Sameer Chauhan kicked off the debate by advocating for the transformative power of the “digital revolution.” Mr. Chauhan added that social media movements, like #MeToo, and e-learning platforms which have democratised education, could have only been brought about because of technology. He asked for observers to “not fear technology, but to harness it” and embrace the inclusion of women in the technological design process from the beginning, to ensure that innovation serves all.
His teammate, Caitlin Kraft-Buchman, Co-Founder and CEO of Women at the Table and the <A+> Alliance for Inclusive Algorithms, praised the ability of technology to open doors for women to succeed. She too noted the positive reach of e-learning which grants “a girl in a remote village as much as a boy in Silicon Valley” access to participation. She urged technology firms to build their platforms and tools with inclusivity in mind from the start to ensure that technology serves as a catalyst to bridge gender gaps.
Arguing against the motion, Itonde Kakoma, President / CEO of Interpeace, emphasised his concern was not about the potential of technologies to advance equality, but about their current failure to do so. Rather, he argued, they were amplifying serious harms against women, digitally reinforcing the gender divide. He cited studies which demonstrated significant AI bias against women candidates in filtering programmes used to process resumes, and algorithmic bias reproducing inequalities in places such as healthcare systems. New technologies, he argued, held “promise, not a reality” for advancing gender equality.
His teammate, former UK Human Rights Ambassador and GCSP Executive Fellow Rita French, reinforced these sentiments by stating that, while she acknowledged the potential benefits of AI and emerging technologies, the balance of whether their effects would be positive or negative rested on how they were accessed, developed and used. She cautioned that women, on average, had lower access to digital tools and lower rates of digital literacy, with 44% of 133 AI systems examined by the <A+> Alliance for Inclusive Algorithms demonstrating gender bias. She added that a large majority of women had experienced online gender-based violence, including three in every four women journalists, and two in every five women parliamentarians.
Following each team’s presentation of arguments, there was a remarkable moment of unity among the panelists. Following an audience suggestion to find consensus rather than declaring winners or losers of the debate, and a positive vote from those present in the room, the motion was amended to read that emerging technologies could be catalysts for accelerating gender equality. The change was applauded by all panelists, who echoed one another in urging for stronger governance guardrails and more inclusive design and operation by technology firms in their products, while cautioning that there was still much work to be done to make women safe, included and empowered by digital and new emerging technologies.
The ultimately unifying debate was closed off by Chair of the IGC Global Board and Secretary General of the Inter-Parliamentary Union, Mr. Martin Chungong, who thanked both teams for their participation and reaffirmed the need for constructive dialogue in order to leverage the potential of new technologies to empower women, and build a safer and more inclusive world “both online and offline.”
To watch the full recording of the debate, please visit this link.