Multilateral Impact
The rules for AI and digital technology aren’t being written in one place. They are being written across dozens of bodies at once: standards bodies, ethics frameworks, science and technology commissions, leadership networks, and civil society coalitions, each in its own language and on its own timeline, rarely talking to one another.
Women at the Table works across all of them, carrying one agenda between tables that rarely meet: embed gender equality and human rights into the architecture now, before it hardens. We don’t just hold seats. We co-found the tables, co-chair the boards, help draft the standards, and move intelligence from one venue to the next, so a win in one room compounds in the others instead of evaporating.
One agenda, every layer of the system
We work at each layer where the rules take shape: agenda-setting, standard-writing, binding law, and the coalitions that hold it all to account.
Setting the agenda
We co-founded the IGC in 2015, the Geneva-rooted network of decision-makers across international organizations, missions, and civil society. Today we sit on its Global Board and co-chair the Digital and New Emerging Technologies Impact Group (2024) with ITU Secretary-General Doreen Bogdan-Martin, keeping gender equality central to the multilateral agenda.
As Co-Chair, we advise the CSTD on the gender dimensions of science, technology, and innovation policy. Because the CSTD is the UN’s focal point for follow-up to the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS), this is also our most direct lever on the WSIS+20 review, where we are working to build transformative gender indicators into every Action Line, with real mandates and resources.
Writing the standards
Council of Europe, Steering Committee for New and Emerging Digital Technologies (CDNET) Women at the Table recently received Observer Status to CDNET. Established by the Committee of Ministers and operating from January 2026, CDNET coordinates the Council of Europe’s work on emerging technologies and is custodian of the Framework Convention on Artificial Intelligence, the first binding international treaty on AI, until its Conference of the Parties is established. CDNET also develops the HUDERIA impact-assessment methodology, which we have integrated into our own Human Rights-Based AI Lifecycle Framework.
UNECE Team of Specialists on Gender-Responsive Standards (WP.6) We sit on the UN Economic Commission for Europe’s expert team advising on the standards that govern how products, data, and systems are built, embedding gender-responsiveness into the technical specifications most people never see but everyone lives inside.
UNESCO Women4Ethical AI and AI Ethics Experts Without Borders (AIEB) We contribute to UNESCO’s expert platforms of leading women in AI, implementing the Gender Policy Action Area of the Recommendation on the Ethics of Artificial Intelligence, the first global AI-ethics standard, adopted by every UNESCO member state.
Making the law binding
CEDAW General Recommendation 40 We contributed to GR40 on equal and inclusive representation of women in decision-making. With the Council of Europe’s Framework Convention on AI, instruments like these turn gender equality from aspiration into binding obligation, leverage we carry into every other room.
Building and holding the coalition
Gender in Digital Coalition Originally formed as “Gender at the Heart of the Global Digital Compact,” this alliance of Derechos Digitales, Equality Now, the Association for Progressive Communications (APC), IT for Change, UN Women, UNFPA, and Women at the Table secured a standalone paragraph on gender in the Global Digital Compact, adopted at the UN Summit of the Future in 2024. Now operating as the Gender in Digital Coalition, we press for gender-specific, actionable indicators so commitments in the Global Digital Compact and the WSIS+20 review can be measured, not merely declared.
This builds on our co-chairing of the CSW67 Expert Group in 2023, the first session of the Commission on the Status of Women to focus on technology and innovation. We also work with the Global Network Initiative’s AI Working Group and the World Benchmarking Alliance’s Collective Impact Coalition for Ethical AI.
Statements & Submissions
Working across these bodies produces a documented record. A selection of our recent statements, submissions, and analyses to the institutions shaping AI governance:
Our Gender Advisory Board analysis for the CSTD puts a number on exclusion: leaving women out of AI development is not only a rights failure but a multi-trillion-dollar economic one. It reframes gender equality in AI from a moral appeal into an economic argument that finance ministries and development banks cannot ignore.
To the CSTD, as Co-Chair of the Gender Advisory Board:
- Gender-Responsive Digital Transformation: Submission for the WSIS+20 Review
- Gender-Responsive Technology Foresight and Assessment: A Human Rights-Based Approach for Sustainable Development
- Technology Foresight, Technology Assessment, and AI Through a Gender Lens
- Implementation and Follow-up to the Outcomes of the World Summit on the Information Society
- WSIS+20: Gender and Human Rights from a Scientific and Economic Perspective
To the Commission on the Status of Women:
- Accelerating Gender Equality in the Digital Age (CSW69 / Beijing+30 side-event)
- Artificial Intelligence to Advance Gender Equality: Challenges and Opportunities (CSW68)
To the Global Digital Compact process:
- Gender at the Heart of the Global Digital Compact
- Algorithmic Accountability as a Human Right (statement to the co-facilitators)
- Global Internet Governance (2023)
On standards:
How the threads connect
The agenda doesn’t live in any single body. It lives in the movement between them. Three threads run through all of it:
- A methodology thread. Our own Human Rights-Based AI Lifecycle Framework integrates the Council of Europe’s HUDERIA model. The field tools we put in practitioners’ hands and the treaty-level instrument we help steward at CDNET share one lineage, each strengthening the other’s credibility.
- A legal thread. CEDAW General Recommendation 40 and the Framework Convention on AI convert gender equality from a value into a binding obligation. That obligation is the leverage we carry into the CSTD, the WSIS review, UNESCO, and the standards bodies, turning “should” into “must.”
- A compact thread. The gender paragraph we won in the Global Digital Compact becomes the mandate the Gender in Digital Coalition, the IGC Impact Group, and Women4Ethical AI each use to hold governments to account: one commitment, enforced from several directions at once.
Most organizations specialize in one forum and one discipline. Our value is that we work across spaces, technical, legal, diplomatic, and feminist, and carry the thread between them, so progress compounds instead of evaporating.
That is what it means to redesign the table rather than wait for a seat at it.