APC submission to the UN Working Group on discrimination against women and girls in the context of digital and AI systems

The Association for Progressive Communications (APC) has submitted detailed input to the UN Working Group on discrimination against women and girls for its forthcoming 2026 thematic report on gender equality in the digital space and the age of AI. The submission provides an extensive overview of how emerging technologies, particularly AI systems, shape risks and rights impacts for women, girls, and gender-diverse people, drawing on APC’s research into technology-facilitated gender-based violence and broader digital rights issues.

The document outlines how AI can intensify well-known harms, including gendered disinformation, online harassment, and non-consensual synthetic imagery. It notes that algorithmic systems built on large-scale data extraction often expose marginalised groups to heightened surveillance and profiling. Examples include facial-recognition deployments that misidentify women and non-binary people, reproductive-health data being reused for unrelated purposes, and the use of deepfakes to discredit women in politics and public life. The submission also highlights structural issues such as biassed training datasets, annotation practices that reproduce stereotypes, and the underrepresentation of women in AI development roles.

The submission also identifies several policy gaps. Current AI governance frameworks, the submission argues, often lack explicit safeguards addressing technology-facilitated gender-based violence, operate separately from gender-equality policies, and rarely incorporate intersectional analysis. Many regulatory instruments reference fairness or inclusion, but do not translate these commitments into enforceable mechanisms or oversight tools. APC recommends several steps for governments and international bodies, including moratoriums on AI systems that cannot be operated in compliance with human rights law, gender-sensitive impact assessments, standards for bias mitigation, and stronger participation of affected communities in governance processes.

The submission also documents APC’s engagements across UN processes, such as contributions to Human Rights Council resolutions on online violence, inputs to the Global Digital Compact, and work with Special Rapporteurs on privacy, freedom of expression, and discrimination. These engagements, APC notes, aim to ensure that evolving digital governance frameworks reflect the realities of women, girls, and other groups who experience disproportionate digital harms.

The Working Group will consider this and other inputs as it prepares its thematic analysis for the Human Rights Council in 2026, focusing on how digital technologies and AI can be governed in ways that reduce discrimination and strengthen rights protections.