Feminist data governance is the set of principles and practices that treat data collection, ownership, and use as sites of power, not neutral infrastructure, and that structure those processes so they redistribute power toward the people the data describes rather than concentrating it in the hands of whoever collects it.
Data about a community, collected without that community’s participation or ongoing consent, tends to serve the interests of the collector rather than the collected. This is especially consequential for gender data, historically incomplete or absent across health, finance, and labour records. Governance determines who gets to ask what questions of a dataset, and who is protected from having their data used against their own interest.
The A+ Alliance approach: The A+ Declaration commits to human-in-the-loop verification of data collection processes, so that data is not gathered at the expense of women and other excluded groups, and to inclusive data collection that prioritizes quality alongside quantity. The Gender & AI Innovation Collective extends the same principle operationally: organizations that build tools in the Feminist AI Innovation Sandbox retain ownership of their data and their outputs, rather than surrendering either to a technical partner.
Related projects
A+ Declaration, Gender & AI Innovation Collective, Feminist AI Research network
Related resources
Feminist AI Network Papers, Feminist AI PubPub, AI4D Knowledge Synthesis Webinars
