2020
The accelerated digital transformation generates deep feminist concerns around access, surveillance, labour, and data governance. Feminist movements highlight the widening digital divide, where poor and rural women face limited access to infrastructure, tools, and literacy. At the same time, the expansion of platform-based labour creates new forms of precarity—work that is flexible for corporations but exploitative and insecure for workers, disproportionately affecting women in the global South.
Beyond questions of access, feminists critique the extractivist logics underpinning the digital economy. Data harvesting functions as a form of “digital extractivism,” where personal information is commodified, surveilled, and exploited by global North-based tech monopolies. These practices mirror the resource extractivism that has long plundered the South, reinforcing asymmetrical power relations while eroding privacy, autonomy, and democratic governance.
Feminist digital justice frameworks push back against these dynamics, calling for the democratisation of digital technologies, safeguards against surveillance, and recognition of gendered online violence. They also insist on supporting feminist-led technological innovation—particularly by and for global South communities—so that digital futures are shaped by justice, care, and collective autonomy rather than extractive profit-driven models.