Quick Win No. 8
Apply a gender lens to the discussions under the Joint Statement Initiative on E-commerce
The digital transformation offers new opportunities for firms across all sectors and of all sizes. Indeed, as Javier López González and Marie-Agnes Jouanjean point out, by reducing trade costs, the digital transformation facilitates the coordination of global supply chains, it helps connect business and consumers globally and enables the digital delivery of services. It is especially important that more vulnerable groups – such as women, indigenous people, and small business owners – can seize new opportunities to overcome significant pre-existing disadvantages in accessing foreign markets.
Women-led firms are generally fewer, smaller, younger and less well financed than those led by men, and they tend to trade less. Digitalization can help level the playing field by enabling greater access to digital inputs and international markets, including in services sectors where women are more active. Despite recent advances, women have substantially less access to the internet in Africa and the Middle East, and to a lesser extent in Asia. In OECD countries, women are much less likely to pursue studies in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM), skills that are often highly remunerated and highly traded. Men represented 79% of ICT students in OECD countries in 2021, and despite recent initiatives to close gender divides in STEM, progress has been slow.
Although digital trade policies discussed at the WTO JSI on E-commerce already stand to benefit women and are not in and of themselves discriminatory, there are some areas where the JSI discussions can support more inclusive outcomes for women. There is a need to:
Promote greater upstream use of gender-differentiated impact analysis to understand the potential impacts of digital trade policy changes, or new e-commerce provisions in trade agreements, on women, including their indirect effects. Digital trade policy choices need to be better informed about the opportunities and challenges they raise for women;
Ensure the participation of women in consultation and engagement processes for digital trade policy-making with a view to promoting more diverse perspectives and identifying promising paths for addressing gender equality issues. This could include consultation with professional organizations that target women;
Promote the use of digital tools to enable women-led firms to engage in trade, including in developing countries. In addition to ongoing efforts to streamline digital trade facilitation and increase market access in digitally enabled services, capacity building programmes targeted at enabling women to connect to the internet and to use digital tools are needed to help bridge emerging divides. Aid for Trade programmes could be harnessed to target digital opportunities through trade for women owned firms;
Leverage capacity building processes in the e-commerce work programme to promote greater gender balance in STEM studies and through the professional Information, Communications and Technology (ICT) pipeline. Greater diversity in the teams creating the tools that are widely used in digital trade can lead to greater inclusivity in trade outcomes. A better understanding of which policies have produced results in closing gender gaps in STEM studies could be a starting point for future policy discussions.
The digital transformation has the potential to be a great leveler for digital trade opportunities, but to realize this potential there is a need to mainstream gender concerns across the digital trade provisions being discussed at the JSI.