The urgency of gender justice in the digital economy – by Anita Gurumurthy and Nandini Chami

The early years of the digital revolution came with unlimited promise for women and their world of work. A radical shift seemed close at hand: web-based entrepreneurship, lifelong skilling, access to global markets, flexible working and more. The reality today, however, is a sobering scorecard for women’s economic agency and citizenship.

In hindsight, this is no big surprise. With digital technologies becoming the handmaiden of neoliberal globalisation, the economic paradigm has witnessed a rapid deepening of inequality. Between 1980 and 2016, coinciding with the transition to the digital epoch, progress on economic inequality worldwide declined: intra-country inequality increased while inter-country inequality is not falling quickly enough.

As labour’s share of national income has steadily gone down, Big Tech firms have been able to amass wealth on an unprecedented scale, leveraging their ‘intelligence advantage’. Harnessing digital intelligence for market consolidation, platforms have upended old-world economic organisation. The shift is global and ubiquitous, with data barons making inroads in all sectors—from agriculture to retail trade, transport, logistics and services—not only displacing traditional players but also decimating small economic actors.Amid much debate about the impact of digitalisation in a globalised world, women have been largely invisible. The EU is the global actor that could change that.

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