World Trade Organization
Representation by Design: From Data to Trade Policy
Dec 2, 10 to 11:30am – Room W
Data is becoming foundational infrastructure for artificial intelligence, public services and economic development. Yet the data record on which these systems rely is profoundly uneven. Traditional trade statistics often focus on firms, sectors, and aggregate economic outcomes, making it difficult to identify who owns, manages, or benefits from trade activities. Gaps in representativeness affect women, speakers of underrepresented languages and many other groups whose experiences have been overlooked in historical data collection. A gender-responsive lens offers a way to examine how these gaps shape the standards and systems that affect us all, revealing barriers that aggregate data can conceal.
Without representative and disaggregated data, policymakers may overlook the specific barriers faced by women-led businesses and MSMEs, such as limited access to finance, information, networks, technology, or standards certification. The session will examine how questions of representation, ownership, benefit-sharing, interoperability and data flows affect the ability of countries to build inclusive trade policies and derive equitable value from the global trading system.
Objectives:
- General: To elevate awareness among WTO Members regarding the importance of representativeness in data (e.g. ensuring the collection of gender and sex disaggregated data), for more responsive and inclusive trade policies, including standards development, in support of further integration of women-led businesses and MSMEs into the global trading system.
- WTO specific: Build Member support for a CA-UK proposal on gender responsive standards (which will include the concept of representativeness by design) in the 11th triennial review of the TBT Agreement (2027 process).
Speakers:
- Moderator (government): Amb. Wilson (Barbados)
- Scene setter (civil society): Caitlin Kraft-Buchman, CEO, Women at the Table
- Practical implementation perspectives (international organization): Vanessa Erogbogbo, Director of the Division of Sustainable and Inclusive Trade, International Trade Centre (ITC)