Draft:Women at the Table

Women at the Table (W@TT) is a global feminist civil society organization (CSO) and think tank focused on advancing gender equality by engaging women in decision-making processes across traditionally male dominated sectors.. Increasingly focused on gender & AI, the organization aims to help make systems more gender-transformative particularly in areas such as governance, technology, and sustainability .

History

Women at the Table was founded in 2014 by Caitlin Kraft-Buchman in Geneva, Switzerland. It received Consultative Status to the United Nations Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) in 2018.

The organization is active in the international arena, serving on the UN Generation Equality Action Coalition for Technology and Innovation for Gender Equality , the Commission on Science and Technology for Development (CSTD) Gender Advisory Board and and the Network of Experts for UN Secretary-Generals’s AI Advisory Body.

Technological Projects

<AI & Equality> A Human Rights Toolbox

The <AI & Equality> Human Rights Toolbox was first conceptualized in 2017 at a W@TT-hosted Roundtable on Gender & AI for the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) Women’s Rights Division. It was designed to introduce audiences to a human-rights based approach to AI and highlight the role of AI system creators and regulators in advancing social justice .

The Toolbox was developed through workshops at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in 2019 and 2020, before Masters student and W@TT tech fellow Sofia Kypraiou expanded the technical portions of the concept as her EPFL Masters thesis. In 2024, following a series of pilot workshops at universities , the online <AI & Equality> Toolbox was launched in collaboration with the Sorbonne Center for Artificial Intelligence (SCAI) in 2024 with the support of the Swiss Federal Department of Foreign Affairs Human Rights Division.

The <AI & Equality> Human Rights Toolbox course consists of five modules :

• Module 1: Human Rights & AI Systems
• Module 2: How Threats to Human Rights Enter the AI Lifecycle
• Module 3: Exploring Fairness in AI Development
• Module 4: Integrating HR-Approaches into AI Development
• Module 5: Putting the Human Rights-based Approach into Practice

The course is designed to be taken asynchronously, though an accompanied online version, termed ‘Summer School,’ was offered in July 2024 .

<A+> Alliance

The <A+> Alliance was co-founded by Women at the Table and Ciudadanía Inteligente as a global coalition of technologists, activists, and academics working to shape more inclusive algorithms . The Alliance’s Declaration and Call to Action was presented as the Keynote at 2019’s Women in Big Data Zürich conference.

The <A+> Alliance launched officially at the 2019 Internet Governance Forum . In 2020, the Alliance published the <A+> Global Directory with 90+ feminist AI leaders from varied disciplines across the world.

In the same year, the <A+> Alliance was nominated for a World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) Award for International and Regional Cooperation, and was named a Fast Company 2020 World Changing Ideas finalist for their work on AI and Data. The < A+ > Alliance was also named a Global Leader for Generation Equality’s Action Coalition: Technology and Innovation for Gender Equality for the 2020-2025 term.

In 2021 the alliance was an official selection of the Paris Peace Forum and took on a new co-leader—Instituto Tecnologico de Costa Rica (TEC).

Through the A+ Alliance, Women at the Table launched the Feminist AI Research Network—stylized as the f<a+i>r network—aimed at making artificial intelligence more effective and inclusive. It is supported by the International Development Research Centre (IDRC) of Canada.

The f<a+i>r network has hubs in Latin America and the Caribbean, Middle East & North Africa, South East Asia , and partners with the AI4D Africa Gender & Inclusion Innovation Lab . Its aim is to support existing feminist technologists in these regions in producing innovative, interdisciplinary models. Current projects include AymurAI, an open-source software that helps courts collect and collate data on gender-based violence, and EDIA , a tool developed to help those without technical backgrounds detect biases in natural language processing systems

The Latin America and Caribbean hub is developed in collaboration with Tecnológico de Monterrey in Mexico, while the South East Asia division is spearheaded by Thailand’s Chulalongkorn University. In the Middle East and North Africa, the hub is run by researchers and activists from the Access to Knowledge for Development Center (A2K4D) consortium at the American University of Cairo's School of Business in Egypt.

Gender Gap App

In 2019, W@TT piloted the Gender Gap App (g-app), a digital tool that uses data to measure and visualize representation, participation and influence in decision-making spaces. It records delegates’ demographics, speaking time, and authority levels to capture the amount of influence they have over the proceedings.

It was developed in collaboration with teams from International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), Inter-parliamentary Union (IPU), World Meteorological Organization (WMO), World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS, and UN Women .

In 2021, the g-app was built in a pro bono collaboration with Thoughtworks . It underwent beta testing at the IPU Assemblies, and the Commission on Science and Technology for Development (CSTD) at UN Trade and Development, before premiering at the Paris Peace Forum .

International Gender Champions

In 2015, Women at the Table co-founded International Gender Champions (IGC) alongside Ambassador Pam Hamamoto, Permanent Representative of the United States to the United Nations in Geneva , and Michael Møller , the Under-Secretary-General of the United Nations and current Director-General of the United Nations Office at Geneva.

International Gender Champions is a leadership network that advocates for systems change and the breaking down of gender barriers in international organizations . W@TT ran the International Gender Champions Secretariat from 2015-2019 .

In 2016, the first IGC Impact Groups were founded, each of which focuses on a specific target for systems change . The IGC Trade Impact Group’s Declaration on Women’s Economic Empowerment was officially adopted by the World Trade Organization in 2017, and renamed the Buenos Aires Declaration on Trade and Women’s Economic Empowerment It was the first international declaration to draw an explicit connection between trade and women's economic empowerment. It was the first time the word ‘women’ was used in an official GATT or WTO document.

The IGC Representation Impact Group consisting of Sweden, the Inter-Parliamentary Union and Women at the Table co-authored the Gender Responsive Assemblies Toolkit, launched at a side event at the UN General Assembly in 2018 . The Toolkit, based on best practices and input of over ten international organizations is now in use in various multilateral fora

In 2018, International Gender Champions became one of the first selections of the Paris Peace Forum . Outside of its Geneva headquarters, the IGC currently has hubs in New York, Nairobi, Vienna, The Hague, and Paris .

Partnerships

Women at the Table has collaborated with a number of different international agencies to advance the role of women in the tech sector, most notably in the realms of algorithmic bias, inclusive data, and feminist foreign policy.

Alongside Gender at Work and Ladysmith Collective, Women@TheTable supplies mentorship to AI For Development Africa’s nine African AI Labs. It also serves as the Civil Society Lead for the World Benchmarking Alliance’s Collective Impact Coalition for Ethical AI , and co-chaired the expert Group for the UN Commission on the Status of Women CSW67 when it had the theme of Technology & Innovation.

W@TT sponsored the first FemTechnology Summit at ETH Zurich in 2021, and partnered with FemTechnology in 2023 to author a research report on the Gender Data Health Gap. The paper outlines the history of missing data in women’s health, lack of research, and the compounded problem of this invisibility when turbocharged by AI systems.