Feminist AI

Feminist AI is the umbrella civil-society framing that names AI governance, design, deployment, and accountability work conducted from explicitly feminist, intersectional, and — in its dominant Global-South-anchored register — decolonial epistemic positions. The framing's working institutional anchor is the <A+> Alliance for Inclusive Algorithms — co-founded in 2019 by Women at the Table and Ciudadanía Inteligente — and the Feminist AI Research Network (f<A+i>r) the Alliance launched in 2020 as its applied-research arm with IDRC support, formalised through the CAD $2,000,000 Advancing Research on Feminist Artificial Intelligence programme that ran from 2022 to February 2025 across regional hubs in Latin America and the Caribbean, the Middle East and North Africa, and South East Asia. The Alliance's working definition — "Artificial Intelligence harnessed to deliver equality outcomes, designed with inclusion at the core, creating new opportunities for proactive, innovative correction of inequities" — and Paola Ricaurte's UNESCO formulation of Feminist AI Governance as "an emerging field of policy, research, advocacy, and development that aims to ensure that AI systems are governed, designed, developed, deployed, and used in ways that are just, equitable, and inclusive" together carry the framing's substantive register. Inside this corpus the framing operates as the cross-regional umbrella under which the named regional anchor organisations — Coding Rights in Brazil, Pollicy in Uganda, Derechos Digitales across Latin America, and Digital Rights Foundation in Pakistan — each carry the framing into their own regional working register.

Origin

The framing's institutional crystallisation runs through the 2019 founding of the <A+> Alliance for Inclusive Algorithms by Women at the Table and the Chilean civil-society organisation Ciudadanía Inteligente as a "consortium of world-class scientists, economists, and activists" committed to translating feminist principles into applied AI-governance research and practice. The Alliance's working definition of Feminist AI sits in its public materials in the verbatim formulation that the framing names AI "harnessed to deliver equality outcomes, designed with inclusion at the core, creating new opportunities for proactive, innovative correction of inequities" — a framing deliberately positioned as more than a bias-mitigation or ethics-of-AI vocabulary, and as the working register through which a substantive feminist, intersectional, and Global-South-grounded reading of AI deployment could enter civil-society organising, multilateral advocacy, and applied research as a single legible field.

The Alliance launched the Feminist AI Research Network (f<A+i>r) in 2020 as its applied-research arm with International Development Research Centre support, building "primarily from the Global South, and mostly women" researchers across machine learning, data science, law, urban planning, human rights, gender, anthropology, economics, and other social sciences. The Network's substantive register operated as a deliberate move beyond what its founders called the descriptive "why" and "what" of feminist AI critique toward applied research on the "how" — "how new Feminist AI and Automated Decision Making (ADM) data, algorithms, models, and systems could concretely and positively impact social / gender justice, improve quality of life, and correct for historic exclusion". The Network's working shape is three regional hubs, each anchored at a regional academic institution and led by a named regional scholar: the Latin America and Caribbean hub at Tecnológico de Monterrey under Paola Ricaurte Quijano, the Middle East and North Africa hub at the Access to Knowledge for Development Center at the American University in Cairo under Nagla Rizk, and the South East Asia hub at Chulalongkorn University under Soraj Hongladarom and Supavadee Aramwith.

The framing's principal funding spine in the period 2022–2025 was the IDRC Advancing Research on Feminist Artificial Intelligence to Advance Gender Equality and Inclusion project, led by Instituto Tecnológico de Costa Rica with CAD $2,000,000 across 36 months. The programme operated through competitive funding calls for applied AI research, regional network development to strengthen researcher capacity across the LAC, MENA, and SEA hubs, integration of gender-equality principles into responsible-AI frameworks, and cross-sector stakeholder engagement across academia, private sector, and government. The 2022–2025 IDRC programme is the corpus's clearest single funded artefact in the Feminist AI register's working operational record, and the February 2025 conclusion of the IDRC-funded phase coincides with the framing's transition from its founding research-and-incubation period into the wider second-phase regional civil-society and multilateral-advocacy life the framing now carries.

Travel into the regional civil-society field

The framing's most consequential working life inside this corpus is the regional civil-society uptake by the corpus's anchor feminist-tech and digital-rights organisations across Latin America, Africa, and South Asia.

Coding Rights, the Rio de Janeiro-headquartered Brazilian feminist digital-rights organisation founded in 2015 by Joana Varon, carries the framing into its named Why is Artificial Intelligence a Feminist Issue? programme line under the Not My A.I. project. The project's substantive register is that "feminists' lenses go beyond the discussion of 'ethics', 'human-centered' or 'transparent' A.I. and enable us to check power imbalances", and the project's working proposal — that AI systems be checked for the automation of oppression before deployment or development, under the "Oppressive A.I.: Feminist Categories to Understand its Political Effects" analytical framework Varon and Paz Peña have developed — is the working Latin-American-feminist-and-decolonial extension the Feminist AI register has acquired through Coding Rights's case-study work across Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and beyond. Not My A.I.'s case-study line on the Plataforma Tecnológica de Intervención Social adolescent-pregnancy-prediction system, on facial-recognition deployment, and on automated welfare-decision systems in Latin America operates as the working public-discourse vehicle through which the Feminist AI register carries into the regional digital-rights case-record.

Pollicy, the Kampala-headquartered feminist civic-tech collective founded in 2016 by Neema Iyer, carries the framing into its named Towards Afro-Feminist AI register — published as an October 2023 handbook for approaching AI governance in Africa under the substantive working claim that "AI is located very much within, reinforces and often amplifies the old gendered and racial structures of power". The Afro-feminist AI register is the framing's clearest single continental-African instance, deliberately positioned as both an African civil-society contribution to the international Feminist AI conversation and as a distinct intersectional register that names the joint racial, colonial, and gendered structures of power that AI deployment in Africa rearticulates. The framework was carried into the international civil-society field through the IGF 2022 workshop Afro-feminist AI Governance: Challenges and Lessons Pollicy convened around its emerging Afro-feminist AI framework. Pollicy's broader programme of feminist-tech work — the Afro-Feminist Data Futures research (2021); the (In)Visible (2022) study of digital threats to Muslim women human-rights defenders; the African Women in Artificial Intelligence (2021) programme; the Data Ladies (2023) data-literacy intensive — operates as the working programme infrastructure inside which the Afro-feminist AI register sits.

Derechos Digitales, the Santiago-headquartered Latin American regional digital-rights non-profit founded in 2005, carries the framing into its regional AI-and-inclusion programme through partnership with the A+ Alliance's Latin America and Caribbean Hub on the feminist-AI line and through the integration of the Feminist AI register with the organisation's wider data-colonialism interpretive frame. The 2025 Association for Progressive Communications 20th-anniversary feature is the framing's clearest single public-record artefact in the organisation's named-leadership register: Co-Executive Directors Jamila Venturini and J. Carlos Lara are credited with the framing that the organisation's leadership runs "in our analyses of the impacts of artificial intelligence and data colonialism", and the article situates the Feminist AI line alongside the regional data-colonialism research programme as the working pair the organisation carries into the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, UNESCO, and UN human-rights-mechanism advocacy.

Digital Rights Foundation, the Lahore-headquartered Pakistani feminist digital-rights non-profit founded in 2012 by Nighat Dad, carries the framing into Pakistani national civil-society organising through its Digital 50.50 feminist e-magazine — anchored on the Network of Women Journalists for Digital Rights and published monthly with women and non-binary contributors — and its AI-and-gender research-and-advocacy line. The magazine's named Artificial Intelligence and Bias: Implications for Women and Minorities (2023, Issue 3) is DRF's clearest single AI-explicit issue and operates as the working South-Asian-feminist publication-vehicle through which the framing carries into the Pakistani digital-rights field alongside DRF's wider programme of work on technology-facilitated gender-based violence, AI-mediated gendered disinformation, AI-synthesised non-consensual intimate imagery, and Pakistan's draft national AI policies.

Cross-regional infrastructure and multilateral uptake

The Feminist AI register has built itself a working cross-regional civil-society infrastructure that operates above any single anchor organisation's national or regional remit. The Women at the Table 2025 multilateral-leadership feature names the partner roster the framing has consolidated since 2019: Code for Africa (Women at the Table's named co-lead on the wider <A+> Alliance for Inclusive Algorithms), Paradigm Initiative, the Association for Progressive Communications, Equality Now, Pollicy, the UN Population Fund, UN Women, and the Global Network Initiative. The cross-regional shape — academic regional hubs at LAC, MENA, and SEA universities, civil-society anchor organisations at Coding Rights (Brazil), Pollicy (Uganda), Derechos Digitales (Chile / regional Latin America), and Digital Rights Foundation (Pakistan), and multilateral partners across the UN system — operates as the framing's working infrastructure for carrying Feminist AI across the regional digital-rights field without dependence on any single anchor or any single funder.

The multilateral uptake the framing has built since 2023 is the framing's clearest single institutional-recognition artefact. The 2023 co-chairing by Women at the Table of the UN Commission on the Status of Women's (CSW67) expert group on Technology and Innovation — the first CSW thematic focus on technology — established the Feminist AI register at the multilateral CSW-process level. The September 2024 inclusion of a named gender paragraph in the Global Digital Compact at the UN General Assembly Summit of the Future placed the framing's substantive demands into the multilateral digital-governance text. Paola Ricaurte's February 2024 publication of How can feminism inform AI governance in practice? through the UNESCO Global AI Ethics and Governance Observatory operates as the framing's clearest UNESCO-record formulation of Feminist AI Governance as a settled multilateral-civil-society field. The October 2023 Argentine Feminist Contributions in Artificial Intelligence: Epistemological Justice and Ethics of Equality symposium — convened by the Argentine Ministry of Foreign Affairs and UNESCO — placed the framing into a named national-and-multilateral policy-deliberation register. The Global Partnership on Artificial Intelligence's Towards Real Diversity and Gender Inclusion in AI Ecosystems project under the Responsible AI Working Group operates as the corresponding G7/G20-aligned multilateral artefact.

Regional vocabularies the umbrella carries

The Feminist AI umbrella operates above three substantive regional vocabularies that each name a distinct grain of the framing's working life inside this corpus. Coding Rights's Oppressive AI framework names the Latin-American-feminist-and-decolonial interpretive register through which automated decision-making systems are read for the automation of oppression rather than the optimisation of fairness; the Oppressive AI register operates as the analytical-framework grain of the umbrella. Pollicy's Afro-feminist AI register names the continental-African intersectional-feminist register that joins gendered, racial, and colonial axes of analysis in a single working framework, situated explicitly inside African civil-society organising rather than as a translation of Anglosphere AI-ethics vocabularies; the Afro-feminist AI register operates as the continental-civil-society-positioning grain of the umbrella. The Bot Populi Feminist Decolonial AI register — articulated by Paola Ricaurte in March 2022 — names the substantive demand that the framing "eradicate multidimensional socio-technical violence in the interconnectedness of oppressive systems" rather than operate as a fair-and-inclusive-AI vocabulary; the Feminist Decolonial AI register operates as the substantive-political grain of the umbrella, and is the register that most clearly distinguishes the framing from Global-North fairness-and-bias and ethics-of-AI vocabularies.

The umbrella's working relationship with the corpus's data-colonialism framing is structurally close: data-colonialism names the substantive macro-pattern (the Global-North / Global-South asymmetry of AI's extraction and accumulation), while Feminist AI names the working programme of positive intervention (the regional civil-society construction of AI-governance, applied-research, and case-study work from explicitly feminist epistemic positions). The two framings travel together across the same regional civil-society infrastructure — Coding Rights, Derechos Digitales, and the wider Al Sur consortium carry both simultaneously, the Feminist AI Research Network's LAC hub operates inside the same intellectual ecology Latin American feminist-decolonial scholarship has produced, and the IDRC programme's funded research portfolio overlaps both registers — and the corpus records them as the working analytical pair that the regional civil-society field carries into its working public-discourse register.

Why it has carried

Three features have made the framing durable in the regional civil-society field over the 2019–2025 window.

First, the framing names a programme of work rather than a single demand. Where the corpus's adjacent biometric-surveillance framings (#BanTheScan, Ban biometric mass surveillance) name policy demands on specific technologies and the corpus's frontier-AI framings (Pause giant AI experiments) name a moratorium demand on a specific class of systems, Feminist AI names a programme of positive civil-society and applied-research construction across AI governance, design, deployment, and accountability — operationalised through research funding (IDRC), academic regional hubs (Tecnológico de Monterrey, AU Cairo, Chulalongkorn), civil-society anchor organisations (Coding Rights, Pollicy, Derechos Digitales, DRF), and multilateral advocacy (UNESCO, CSW, the Global Digital Compact). The breadth of the operational footprint is what has converted the framing from a 2019 institutional intervention into a working cross-regional civil-society field.

Second, the framing carries a Global-South-anchored epistemic position that refuses the assumption that AI-ethics and AI-governance vocabularies flow from the Global North to the Global South. The f<A+i>r Network's deliberate recruitment of "100+ feminist AI thinkers primarily from the Global South" is the substantive structural commitment behind the framing's working public life. The three regional hubs at LAC, MENA, and SEA universities — and the parallel African civil-society infrastructure Pollicy and Code for Africa carry — operate as the working signal that the framing's leading contribution to global AI governance is being articulated from Global-South positions in their own analytical, methodological, and linguistic terms. Ricaurte's UNESCO framing of the principle that "algorithms are opinions embedded in code" and that they are "sociotechnical assemblages" rather than abstract entities is the working epistemological commitment that distinguishes the framing from a fair-and-inclusive-AI vocabulary.

Third, the framing's umbrella shape lets regional vocabularies (Oppressive AI, Afro-feminist AI, Feminist Decolonial AI, data-colonialism) and national programmatic registers (DRF's Digital 50.50 AI-and-gender editorial frame, R3D and Derechos Digitales's regional advocacy under the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, Coding Rights's case-study line) co-exist underneath a single legible institutional banner without forcing convergence onto a single regional analytical vocabulary. The umbrella has converted what would otherwise be a dispersed set of regional civil-society feminist-tech registers into a working cross-regional field — one whose institutional anchor (the <A+> Alliance and the f<A+i>r Network), funding spine (IDRC 2022–2025 and successor funding), academic infrastructure (the three regional hubs), civil-society partner roster (Coding Rights, Pollicy, Derechos Digitales, DRF, Paradigm Initiative, APC, Code for Africa, Equality Now), and multilateral-advocacy footprint (UNESCO, CSW, the Global Digital Compact, GPAI) together establish Feminist AI as the corpus's working umbrella register for civil-society AI-governance work conducted from explicitly feminist, intersectional, and decolonial epistemic positions across the Global South.