The increase of misogynistic online speech and violence against women poses the question of whether and how their participation in the digital online spheres has been also affected. If so, an additional question is how these restraints have influenced their wellbeing. Participating in these spheres has been associated with “human flourishing”, deliberation, constructing social identities and communities. Existing declarations of digital rights and new internet regulation seem to overlook these forms of gendered exclusion. Policy and regulatory recommendations are needed.
Gendertnet aims to explore the various efforts of gendered exclusion in the digital public spheres. The multidisciplinary team – which will include input from law, HCI, computer science – will follow quantitative and qualitative methodologies – and will attempt to identify the paths and strategies of such attempts and the impact to women’s wellbeing.
Research will attempt to specify which online spaces and the phenomenon is more intense within and the design practices (i.e. online trolls, lack of built-in tools to mute, block, and report these behaviours, existence of mechanisms that facilitate or provoke users to silence women, the need of privacy settings for immersive spaces (i.e. “not touch feature”), and the chilling effects of AI content moderation algorithms like flagging feministic content as antifeminist etc. Our aim will be to use creative methods (creative industries) to make more visible the typology of these patterns and how to address these issues and inform public, policy makers, industry, and police.
Start date: 1 September 2024 – 31 March 2025
Project team: Anna-Maria Piskopani, Liz Dowthwaite, Nicholas Gervassis, Richard Hyde, Boriana Koleva, Aislinn Bergin
Gendernet is a Horizon Welfare Campaign project.
Horizon Digital Economy Research, University of
Nottingham Innovation Park, Triumph Road, Nottingham,
NG7 2TU
horizon@nottingham.ac.uk
