In developing countries, the COVID-19 pandemic has had a profound effect on important industries. According to predictions, the industries most likely to be negatively impacted by the pandemic in Asia are agriculture, fisheries, food processing, textiles, tourism, domestic work, and retail—all of which have significant rates of female labor force involvement. Women in the artisanal, agricultural, and service sectors will undoubtedly suffer severely.
How digital age bailouts will take place when the current crisis passes is still a mystery to us. However, a tragicomedy is about to play out. Platform corporations valued at millions of dollars, which have consistently denied workers their rights, are now offering crowdfunding services to the public in an effort to gather money to provide protection to workers facing the COVID issue. Throughout history, feminists have advocated for the socialization of care. However, the socialization of care by platform companies highlights the perverse inventiveness of neoliberalism, normalizing consumer dependence on privatized public utilities and demonstrating the desperation of both governments and consumers to maintain them.
The majority of female street vendors and small business owners are under lockdown, which has serious consequences for household food security. However, several nations have permitted e-commerce behemoths to offer non-essential goods.
A feminist digital future
It is imperative that we look at how data value chains may support local economies of production and innovation where women are acknowledged and valued and where natural ecosystems are maintained if we are to have a feminist digital future. The new global feudals and their business strategies have benefited greatly from the internet medium's innate tendency toward separation. However, it has atomized labor and depublicized marginalized bodies, dematerializing the workplace. Because of technological advancements in robotics and artificial intelligence, women's labor is no longer necessary to create value.
In the aftermath of COVID-19, experts from all across the world have advocated for a focus on distributive justice.
Distributive justice is meaningless unless social reproduction plays a major role in how it is actually implemented. Today, a new social contract that treats women as valuable is both required and feasible. Assuring women's social and economic citizenship is necessary to achieve this. We cannot rely on technology to drive economic growth. The selection of technology must be guided by economic policy.
A digital economy that is feminist means several things. Legally, women must have the right to access the internet, and underprivileged women must be given free data allocations. They must have access to fresh possibilities for training. Labor intermediaries must intensify their efforts to connect with and retrain female workers over the Internet. In order to promote data value chains and ensure that both personal and non-personal data are subject to the proper rules and regulations, public investments in digital infrastructure are required. In order to address the care problem, agenda-setting for the digital economy should prioritize domestic value chains, increasing the number of jobs available to women, and AI advances for the public sector (health, energy, transportation, etc.). In developing nations, expanding efficient public service delivery is a top national objective.
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