Governance and Technologies of Surveillance: Revisiting the Gendered Divide

Although new technologies can serve as tools for creating an environment of equal opportunities and empowerment, they also reflect and reinforce an offline gendered social order. The paper examines the emergence of new cultures of control based on technological designs that support infringements of privacy and new practices of surveillance and argues that technologies left unchecked constitute tools for new forms of surveillance and control of women´s lives. These under-researched issues are mapped and international policy initiatives are discussed against this matrix. It discusses whether and in which ways policies adequately recognise gender based practices and impacts of these developments by interrogating the nexus of gender, privacy and surveillance in the digital age.