STUDY GUIDE
UNCSW
Agenda
Gendered Implications of Digital Surveillance and
Feminist Legal Frameworks for Safeguarding
Women's Rights in the Age of AI and Biometric
Technologies
INDEX
Letter from Executive Board 3
I. The Mandate and Function of the 4
UNCSW
II. Understanding the Agenda 5
III. Constraints on Women's Advancement 6
in the Digital Age
IV . The Role of Civil Society and Grassroots
8
Activism
V. Proof/Evidence Admissible in Committee 9
Letter from Executive Board
Distinguished Delegates,
Welcome to the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women. We are here to
tackle how digital surveillance, artificial intelligence, and biometric technologies are
reshaping women’s rights in the 21st century. This is a challenge to the very ideals of
universal dignity our world is built on.
Women have always been foundational to their societies. Today, however, their
participation and privacy are increasingly threatened by technologies that are not
neutral but shaped by existing inequalities. Your job is to untangle the relationship
between patriarchal norms, rapidly advancing digital tools, and the human rights
framework that protects us all. We will explore how biased algorithms, intrusive data
collection, and discriminatory biometric systems can pave the way for policies and
practices that deny political participation, undermine bodily autonomy, and harm
vulnerable women and girls. This often creates a vicious cycle: harmful technologies
reinforce inequality, which is then used to justify even harsher control.
You must balance a state’s right to pursue innovation and security with its undeniable
duty to uphold human rights and protect women from discrimination and violence.
This guide will give you the background you need for a meaningful debate and covers
the key aspects of the topic but should not limit how much you explore. I encourage you
to study your country’s stance, learn from global and regional examples, and think of
solutions that are practical.
Yours faithfully,
Yashveer Tiwari, Chairperson
Avnee Prasad, Vice Chairperson
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I. The Mandate and Function of the
UNCSW
This Commission is not a court; it cannot force countries to act. Its power comes from
setting global standards and shaping international policy.
Core Function
The UNCSW was created in 1946. It is the most important global body that works only on
gender equality and the empowerment of women. It is a functional commission of the
Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC). Its main job is to be a place where member states,
UN bodies, and civil society can track progress, find new problems, set global standards, and
create policies to help women around the world. It is the center of the UN's work on gender.
equality, documenting what life is like for women and building agreement on how to meet
their needs.
Primary Output
The most important thing for delegates to know is that the UNCSW does not create
legally binding treaties. At the end of its yearly session, the commission negotiates and
adopts a document called the "agreed conclusions" on the main topic. This document is
created through careful negotiation and must be agreed upon by all 45 member states in
the commission.
While you cannot enforce the agreed conclusions in a court, they have great political
importance. They show what the world community wants and act as a "blueprint" for action.
Governments, UN agencies, and other groups use this document to guide their own work.
Your goal in this committee is not to write a treaty, but to create clear and strong language
for the agreed conclusions that will inspire real change.
Monitoring Role
In 1996, the UNCSW's job grew. It was given the main role in watching over the
implementation of the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action (1995). This is the
most important global policy document on gender equality, and it lists 12 key areas of
concern. This role connects the UNCSW's work to an important history and makes sure
that new issues, like digital technology, are looked at through the goals set in Beijing.
Delegates should refer to the Beijing Platform for Action often to give their arguments
more weight.
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II. Understanding the Agenda
The International Framework for Women's Rights
At the center of this agenda is the basic idea that women's rights are human rights, and
rights protected offline must also be protected online. Foundational frameworks like the
Beijing Platform for Action (BPfA) and the Convention on the Elimination of All
Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) provide the legal and moral basis
for our work. Though drafted before the modern digital era, their principles are timeless.
The BPfA's call to increase women's access to new communication technologies and combat
negative stereotypes directly informs today's debates on the digital divide and algorithmic
bias. Similarly, CEDAW's comprehensive ban on discrimination can be interpreted to cover
digital harms, obligating states to address discriminatory algorithms and protect women
from abuse facilitated by private technology companies.
More recently, the Agreed Conclusions of the 67th Session of the UNCSW (2023) provide a
direct and modern consensus on our topic. This document established a clear blueprint, with
member states agreeing on the urgent need to close the gender digital divide, promote
gender-responsive technology design, and recognize the continuity between online and
offline violence.
The Technologies Shaping Our Future
Digital Surveillance: This is the widespread collection of data that tracks people's
actions, messages, and movements. It includes both government surveillance and the
commercial model of tech companies that collect vast amounts of personal information
for profit.
Artificial Intelligence (AI): These are computer systems trained on vast datasets to
perform tasks that usually need human intelligence, like making predictions or decisions.
Crucially, if the data used to train an AI contains human biases, the AI will learn and often
magnify those biases on a huge scale.
Biometric Technologies: These systems use a person's unique physical traits, like their
face or fingerprints, for identification. While often seen as objective, they are built on AI
and can have higher error rates for women and people of color if not trained on diverse
data.
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III. Constraints on Women's
Advancement in the Digital Age
The harms of digital technology are not gender-neutral. They intersect with and magnify
pre-existing structures of discrimination, creating unique and severe risks for women and
girls.
Reproductive data risks
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has shown that period-tracking and digital
health apps often collect sensitive reproductive data and may share them with third parties;
this creates risks in jurisdictions where reproductive rights are restricted.
Apps and devices that track health and fertility can collect very sensitive information. For
instance, many menstrual-cycle and pregnancy apps gather data on users’ periods,
contraception use, pregnancy status, and other reproductive health details. Because
governments and private insurers increasingly use data, this can put women at risk where
their reproductive choices are contested. Even if companies claim to anonymize the data, it
can often be re-identified. In places with strict abortion laws or social stigma, this data
could be misused against women. This raises new privacy questions that feminist advocates
say need strong safeguards.
The United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) has also engaged in reviewing privacy
and data use issues in femtech, noting that reproductive data need stronger safeguards in
digital health ecosystems.’
Gendered Surveillance and Data Exploitation
In cases of domestic violence, abusers frequently use spyware, GPS tracking, and
stalkerware as tools of coercive control. The National Network to End Domestic
Violence (NNEDV) reports that stalkerware is a growing safety concern for survivors,
while the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) has
highlighted that digital surveillance technologies extend coercion into online and mobile
environments.
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Digital Violence and Online Harassment
Online life exposes women to technology-facilitated violence, which is violence that happens
through or is amplified by digital tools. It ranges from sexist trolling, doxing (publishing
private info), to non-consensual sharing of intimate images and AI generated deepfake
pornography targeting women. Studies show this is widespread: about 85% of women have
experienced or seen gendered harassment online. In fact, women are much more likely than
men to be harassed in digital spaces. In UN Women’s explainer “Creating safe digital spaces
free of trolls, doxing, and hate speech” , it states, “A European study found that women are 27
times more likely to face harassment online than men, and another analysis found that 92 per
cent of women reported that online violence negatively influences their wellbeing. ” This
harassment silences women. Abuse on social media and messaging apps may become a
barrier to women’s freedom of speech and activism.
Algorithmic Bias and AI Discrimination
Many people assume computers are neutral, but AI tools often reflect old biases on a new
scale. Because AI learns from past data, it can discriminate against women in areas like
hiring, finance, and health care. For example, some resume-filtering AI have downgraded
women’s applications (reflecting historical workplace bias). Credit algorithms may
disadvantage women who historically earned less. A research paper from MIT, in the
Proceedings of Machine Learning Research (PMLR) titled “Gender Shades: Intersectional
Accuracy Disparities in Commercial Gender Classification” , discovered that commercial
facial-recognition systems may have very high error rates for dark-skinned women up to
34.7% errors compared to under 1% for light-skinned men. This stark example shows how AI
vision tools can fail on women of color. This shows that these systems were mostly tested on
datasets of white men.
The CEDAW Committee’s 2023 General Recommendation on women’s rights in the
digital era highlights that “AI… learns from frequently gender-biased training data, carrying
gender-based discrimination from the analogue into the digital world” . It urges states to
require gender-sensitive, non-biased AI, with audits and human-rights checks at every
stage.
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Intersectionality and Vulnerable Groups
Digital harms affect all women, but not equally. Women of color, indigenous women, LGBTQ+
women, migrant women, and women with disabilities often face extra barriers and risks
online. For instance, surveys have found that women of color and LGBTQ+ people face the
highest rates of online violence. A Black woman might find that an AI system misreads her
face, or a disabled woman might struggle to get accessible online services. In surveillance
heavy societies, marginalized women’s data can be used to profile or target them. Policies to
protect women must consider these differences. Safeguards must account for the fact that,
say, a rural woman or a transgender woman may be targeted differently by digital tools than
a wealthy urban woman.
IV . The Role of Civil Society and
Grassroots Activism
The main force for progress on digital rights is often not government-led change but the
tireless work of civil society organizations (CSOs), women's rights organizations, and local
feminist movements. In places that are restrictive or even openly hostile, these groups
perform essential jobs that governments often cannot or will not do.
A key example of civil society's contribution is the development of the Feminist Principles of
the Internet. Led by the Association for Progressive Communications (APC), this global,
collaborative effort created a framework for a gender-just digital world. Its 17 principles offer
concrete ideas on issues like consent, privacy, online violence, and anonymity. They affirm
that surveillance is a tool of patriarchy used to control women's bodies and activism, and
state that it is the collective responsibility of all stakeholders (governments, companies, and
users) to prevent and respond to technology-related gender-based violence.
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V. Proof/Evidence Admissible in
Committee
Evidence or proof from the following sources will be accepted as credible in the
committee:
1) News Sources
a) REUTERS – Any Reuters’ article which clearly makes mention of the fact stated or is in
contradiction of the fact being stated by another delegate in council can be used to
substantiate arguments in the committee.
b) State operated News Agencies – These reports can be used in the support of or against the
State that owns the News Agency. These reports, if credible or substantial enough, can be
used in support of or against any country as such but in that situation, they can be denied by
any other country in the council. Some examples are-
i) RIA Novosti (Russia)
ii) IRNA (Iran)
iii) Xinhua News Agency and CCTV (P.R. China)
2) Government Reports:
These reports can be used in an analogous way as the State Operated News Agencies reports
and can, in all circumstances, be denied by another country. However, a nuance is that a
report that is being denied by the Executive Board as credible information can still be
accepted by a certain country. Some examples are,
a) Government Websites like the State Department of the United States of America
or the Ministry of Defence of the Russian Federation
b) Ministry of Foreign Affairs of various nations like India or People’s Republic of
China.
c) Permanent Representatives to the United Nations Reports
[Link]
d) Multilateral Organizations like NATO, ASEAN, or OPEC .
3) UN Reports:
All UN Reports are considered credible information or evidence from the Executive Board of
the UNCSW.
a) UN Bodies like the UNSC or UNGA.
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b) UN Affiliated bodies like the International Atomic Energy Agency, World Bank,
International Monetary Fund, International Committee of the Red Cross, etc.
c) Treaty Based Bodies like the Antarctic Treaty System, the International Criminal
Court.
NOTE: Under no circumstances will sources like Wikipedia, Amnesty International,
Human Rights Watch or newspapers like the Guardian, Times of India, etc. be accepted
as PROOF/EVIDENCE. But they can be used for better understanding of any issue or
even be brought up in debate if the information given in such sources is in line with the
beliefs of a government.
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THINK
DISCUSS
PROSPER