Gender-Inclusive E-Commerce in a Post-COVID-19 Recovery
Amalie G. Thystrup is a trade expert based in Copenhagen –Twitter @GThystrup. This blog post builds on the author’s article, first appearing in The Journal of World Investment & Trade, entitled “Gender-Inclusive Governance for E-Commerce.”
Image courtesy of Shutterstock
Trade and gender is in the spotlight. The international community has committed to making trade more inclusive, and taken steps to facilitate women’s participation in the global trading system. Gender equality is front and centre in the United Nations’ 2030 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in SDG 5, and in 2017, the Buenos Aires Joint Declaration on Trade and Women’s Economic Empowerment set a milestone for insisting on gender equality’s place in trade policymaking. In the backdrop of the massive trade disruption wrought by the COVID-19 pandemic, the issue of trade and gender becomes ever more critical as women’s economic fortunes have taken a particular hit. One avenue for increasing women’s participation in the trading system is through electronic commerce (e-commerce). Unlike traditional commerce, which has been rocked by lockdowns, e-commerce has seen a reverse trend— demand has soared and supply has followed suit, generating massive revenues for online shopping giants in particular, despite supply chains experiencing delays in delivery. Amalie G. Thystrup
This year, on 22 July 2020, the G20 Ministers responsible for the digital economy met to discuss how to harness digital technologies to realize the opportunities of a 21st century for all. That meeting produced a Ministerial Declaration that emphasizes the importance of the digital economy and the need for policy discussions to sustain progress on the implementation and achievements of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. However, we have yet to understand the ways that e-commerce can incorporate gender equality to act on and implement these aspirations. A multilevel framework of gender-inclusive regulations and policies for e-commerce can help counter the key policy challenges of access to digital infrastructure and access to resources that negatively affect women’s economic participation in e-commerce activities.
I argue that dedicated gender-inclusive governance for the ever more important economic engine that is e-commerce can contribute to the goal of closing the gender gap. The strong performance of e-commerce during the pandemic should motivate policy makers to double-down on recovery efforts that promote e-commerce and, in doing so, put forward proposals for the implementation of gender-inclusive e-commerce in these policy responses. This is the time to be ambitious about facilitating a gender-inclusive, digitally oriented economic recovery that will improve economic outcomes long after the pandemic is over.
The Gender Digital Divide and E-Commerce
There is no single universally accepted definition of the “gender gap,” but Penny Bamber and Cornelia Staritz explain that it encompasses the structural differences women face in terms of: (i) the gendered composition of the labor force; (ii) women’s primary responsibility for reproductive work; (iii) and women’s differential access to and control over resources relative to men. These structural differences produce discrimination not solely based on sex but on gender more broadly. In fact, the gender gap is a multidimensional concept sensitive to sex, gender, and sexual orientation. It is also dynamic in its multiplicity as it intersects with race, status, and origin.
The gender digital divide, however, is more narrow, and can be defined as the gender differences in resources and capabilities to access and effectively utilize information and communication technology (ICT) within and between countries, regions, sectors, and socio-economic groups. There are three key policy challenges for women’s participation in trade that are just as relevant in the digital space as well: market access, regulatory barriers, and access to resources. But Jan Yves Remy also finds that the root causes of the gender digital divide are limited access to the internet and digital technologies for women, low technological literacy rates, and also limited visibility of women in decision-making roles within the tech industry. In effect, the gender-based differential access to IT infrastructure and IT skills exacerbates the gender gap into a gender digital gap. It is a key challenge for women’s participation in e-commerce, because access to IT infrastructure and IT skills are prerequisites for the activity, as well as access to financial infrastructure. While e-commerce may reduce the need for financing, it demands financial technologies for making and accepting online payments, and the right to hold and access an account. So, e-commerce promises opportunities for women but the promise rests on an assumption that the conditions for seizing new opportunities exist.
Because of their structural nature, the key challenge of women’s participation in e-commerce mirror the key challenges facing women’s participation in the economy at large and in conventional trade. As explained by Bamber and Staritz, first, women face a disadvantage in responding to new economic incentives because of gender differences in access to productive resources, such as land, credit, skills, education, infrastructure, utilities, and services. Second, women tend to be concentrated in fewer sectors, and are impacted by gendered job segregation. Third, women’s responses to potential opportunities in new economic activities are dampened by time constraints, such as unpaid domestic work, primary caregiving responsibilities, poor infrastructure, and poor services, which heighten these challenges for many women in developing countries in particular.
However, a recent report by the World Bank highlights that new trends in global trade— especially the rise in services, global value chains, and the digital economy— are opening up important economic opportunities for women. It also highlights that trade has the potential to expand the role of women in the economy, decrease inequality, and expand women’s access to skills and education. For women to reap these rewards, the report recommends, inter alia, that countries adopt trade policy reforms that reduce discrimination against women. Research on the relationship between trade and gender shows that the assumption that trade reforms will benefit men and women equally does not always hold. Simply put, trade policy does not automatically generate gender-neutral results, and trade rules are not gender-neutral. Therefore, it cannot be assumed that the key policy challenges for women’s participation in trade revolving around market access, regulatory barriers, and access to resources can be overcome with the current approaches to trade policy.
Gender-Inclusive E-commerce Governance
This is where a framework for improving policymaking and rules to overcome barriers for women’s participation in e-commerce comes in. The positive effect that e-commerce could have on the gender gap is not guaranteed without multilevel and inclusive governance. A number of options exist for incorporating and implementing gender-inclusive e-commerce regulations into a comprehensive hierarchy of global-to-national governance for sustainable development. This multilevel approach to gender-inclusive (e-commerce) governance requires engagement with the key policy challenges facing women from the domestic policy level and upwards, with a specific focus on the regional level. Attention to specific issues such as IT skills and finance would see domestic reforms implement gender-inclusive provisions as well.
At the same time, gender mainstreaming efforts anchored in international organizations will help move the trade and gender agenda forward and promote reading gender equality into the rule-based trading system of the WTO. Specifically, gender equality would be incorporated into the regulatory space of e-commerce talks. Those involved in negotiating new e-commerce rules at the WTO, launched in 2019 by a group of 76 WTO Members, can do this by incorporating gender-inclusive language into the provisions, establishing an enabling environment for e-commerce, and also into disciplines on transparency, non-discrimination, market access, predictability of the regulatory environment, capacity building, and cooperation.
But in the current absence of global consensus, regional trade agreements can also be instrumental in bridging global goals and national deliverables. The gender-inclusive trade agenda spans countries and blocs across the globe, and at different levels of development, from the Global South to the Northern hemisphere, to regional organizations like ECOWAS, SADC, APEC, and the OECD. The range and type of provisions included in these various agreements are diverse, and have been identified by the ITC. They include provisions such as: reaffirming commitments to gender equality, safeguarding those achievements, promoting gender-responsive policies, and provisions to advance cooperation on trade and gender.
Injecting gender equality into the modalities of e-commerce and the regulatory space of e-commerce chapters is particularly promising for overcoming the gender digital divide in e-commerce exports. Incorporating gender equality into the elements for establishing an enabling environment for e-commerce could, in particular, foster agency and economic opportunity because these elements include rights, effective redress, protection from discrimination, transparency, and cooperation, which link to the key challenges women face in access to digital infrastructure and access to resources. Here, policymakers should pay close attention to the language used because different language can produce different results.
For example, Canada’s proposal for a provision on the development of measures as part of negotiations on GATS article 6:4, Domestic Regulations, illustrates a gender-inclusive scope when stipulating that Members shall ensure that certain measures do not discriminate against individuals on the basis of gender. However, this wording was later changed to stipulate that Members shall ensure that certain measures do not discriminate between men and women. This binary wording could potentially have gender-preclusive results if the multiplicity of the gender gap is not read into the scope of individuals protected from discrimination. Furthermore, market access produced by such disciplines depends on the underlying schedules of commitments. Where they are sector-specific, they can produce different results for women because of how the labor market is gendered, or the size of firms in those sectors. This must be kept in mind in designing new rules.
Gender-Inclusive Trade Policy and the Post-COVID-19 Recovery
The current trade landscape is afflicted by the COVID-19 outbreak, which seems to have accelerated existing negative trends. If this holds, inequalities will be exacerbated as the health and socio-economic fallout from the pandemic disrupts demand and supply, and under such circumstances, we could see a deepening of the gender digital divide. As governments work to contain the virus and manage the economic fallout, e-commerce, along with ICT and teleworking, occupies a central role in economic activity. In contrast to conventional trade, which suffers under disruption on both the demand side and the supply side, e-commerce platforms report record sales, with online demand increasing despite the pandemic disrupting supply. Part of this development is an expansion in infrastructure associated with e-commerce and ICT, such as contactless payment and teleworking platforms for running businesses remotely.
However, not all firms can equally reap the rewards of e-commerce. The e-commerce giants— eBay, Amazon, and AliBaba—are reporting record revenues. Amazon’s sales shot up to $96.1 billion USD in the three months leading up to 30 September 2020, up 37% compared to the same period in 2019. Amazon profits hit a record $6.3 billion USD, nearly three times last year's total. This trend will likely carry into the holidays. However, smaller firms are uniformly less likely to export and are more hampered in their ability to participate in e-commerce than larger firms. Furthermore, women tend to be concentrated in smaller firms and are also more likely to be employed in unskilled labor or hold a job further down in the supply chain. These characteristics make women more vulnerable to the economic fallout of the pandemic, and less able to access opportunities from e-commerce. In fact, women’s jobs are 1.8 times more vulnerable to the crisis than men’s jobs, and while women make up 39 percent of global employment, women account for 54 percent of overall job losses during COVID-19 pandemic so far.
With the COVID-19 outbreak reorienting the way we work and interact in our daily lives, the time is ripe for re-engaging with measures that can counter key challenges for women’s economic empowerment. Here, e-commerce can be a driver for advancing gender-inclusivity as an integral component of any post-COVID-19 recovery. The pandemic is making it painfully clear that we do not know what is ahead, and that there are no guarantees. But online work and ICT-enabled service exports can be particularly empowering for women expected to stay at home and for women who lack professional networks and resources relative to men. Furthermore, e-commerce has the potential for serving as a central engine to the post-COVID-19 recovery as it ensures the basic need of social distance while allowing for telework and flexible schedules.
To leverage this potential, policymakers should engage at the domestic level and with regional blocs to implement gender-inclusive reforms and relief packages, while drawing on the gender mainstreaming resources of international institutions. From the get-go, policymakers should abandon flawed assumptions of gender-neutrality to avoid recoding them into COVID reforms. Instead, they should accelerate efforts to address the key gender challenges, focus on establishing an enabling environment for e-commerce and secure access to finance, plan for the long-term improvement of IT skills, and design labor market policies around teleworking and flexible hours of online work. Gender-inclusive governance can foster more agency and economic empowerment, make gender-inclusive e-commerce a vehicle for the post-COVID-19 recovery, and ensure a positive effect on the gender gap as part of that recovery.
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