Held in Tunis, since 2018, the Mediterranean Women Digital Summit gathers every year activists, entrepreneurs as well as academicians from countries of the southern Mediterranean region but also from Europe. This platform aims at exploring the opportunities digitalization offers to women empowerment. This year’s edition focused more particularly on the gender imbalance observed on the Internet space, as it is the case in our societies at large. Through a set of panel discussions and peer consultations, the objective was to construct a reflection process on how making the Internet a more gender-equal place.
The first part of the discussions highlighted the fact that the issue of gender bias on the Internet goes far beyond purely technical considerations. Indeed, the experiences that users have on the Internet considerably shape their social impact and their sensitivity to the visibility of all segments of society, including women and young women. Therefore, the issue of gender on the Internet must first and foremost be approached as a matter of public policy for governments and as a matter of law for judicial systems. Frequently recurring recommendations in the discussions focused on the creation of safe spaces for women on the Internet with sexual harassment reporting mechanisms and focal points to key Internet stakeholders so that coordination can be better coordinated with governments.
The Mediterranean Women Digital Summit also brought together technical experts on very specific issues such as artificial intelligence. On this point, the discussions clearly showed how important it is to keep in mind that artificial intelligence is conceived with a human point of view and reflects in a certain way our own contradictions. Ultimately, AI systems should be based on human values and not the other way around. An interesting proposal to progress towards this goal is to create channels of exchange between the humanities and technology. Thus, in the field, more and more research teams are integrating sociologists and political scientists into their ranks.
Finally, given the richness of the exchanges made during the third edition of the Mediterranean Women Digital Summit and the significant interest shown by the online participants, the KAS Regional Program Political Dialogue South Mediterranean will start a series of discussions in 2021. Thought as preliminary discussions, these discussions will mainly have the function of consultation in order to develop a fourth edition that is more interactive and is the product of the growing network that this event has been supporting for 3 years.
