To the technology industry,
Last month I stood in a room with 6,000 gender equity advocates, researchers, and policymakers from 180 countries. I was at the most important gathering on women’s rights in the world – Women Deliver. Yet,as far as I could tell, we (Capyble) were the only people there building technology to solve what was being discussed.
Yep. To our knowledge, we were the only tech company at world’s largest gathering on gender equality.
I’ve been turning that over ever since. It’s not that technology doesn’t matter to gender equality. It does. But, it’s often implicated as the problem, not the solution.
Australia’s eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant reinforced this as part of a tech “perfect storm”. She said the tech sector was behaving like the car industry did back in the day – it’s like we’re driving a car without the seatbelt.
She recounted how manufacturers fought safety regulations for decades. Now, they compete on safety standards. In the gender equity space, we are still building cars without seatbelts, and the people who build the cars aren’t showing up to the road safety conference.
Indeed, 1 in 2 women experience technology-facilitated abuse globally. 1 in 7 Australian adults report engaging in workplace technology -facilitated sexual harassment. Yet at the conference, it was shared that platforms with hundreds of billions in annual revenue spend only an estimated 1-2% on tech safety.
The infrastructure that amplifies women’s voices, enables equality and prevents violence is the same infrastructure that enables their silencing. And, the people who own that infrastructure were not in Melbourne last month.
That’s what surprised me. Not the absence of tech startups… we’re small, we’re scrappy, I understand the pull towards the obvious markets. What surprised me was the absence of urgency. The sense that the gender equity space is someone else’s problem.
Here’s what I saw on the floor instead: decades of rigorous research, evidence base after evidence base, and frameworks that were sophisticated, survivor-informed, and actionable. I saw organisations doing extraordinary work with extraordinary constraints. Organisations with the funding, the bandwidth, the reach of a fraction of what a mid-sized SaaS company takes for granted.
The knowledge to tackle inequality and violence exists. The technology to scale it barely does. And that gap between the evidence and the infrastructure is costing people their safety.
Every conversation we had at Women Deliver confirmed something we’d suspected: the people closest to this work don’t need more evidence. But, they do need tools. They need practical, scalable, defensible tools that translate what we know into what organisations can actually do.
The tech industry is extraordinarily good at finding problems worth solving. We’ve built infrastructure for payments, for logistics, for entertainment, for food delivery — sectors that don’t carry anything close to the moral weight of this one.
So I’m asking the tech sector directly, directly: where are you?
The evidence is there. The obligation is there – legally and morally. The people doing the work on the ground would welcome the tools. The market for doing this well is enormous and largely untouched. You don’t have to solve gender inequity. You just have to decide it’s worth showing up for.
We’d love some company over here.