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It Starts with Us: Lessons from the 2025 GEWAL Summit

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 A central theme emerged during the 2025 Gender Equality, Wellness, and Leadership (GEWAL) Summit: It starts with us. Panellists spoke to the critical need for women to occupy spaces, share their voices, and practice self-love in the age of intelligent technologies.

Convened under the theme Catalysing Culture and Innovation, the conference explored the ways technology and innovation are reshaping our perceptions, influencing our behaviours, and creating new societal norms. Speakers drew attention towards technology’s potential to hinder, or facilitate, progress in gender equality.

Sourced from the insights shared during the 2025 commemoration of International Women’s Day, we’ve highlighted key challenges, and necessary interventions, to ensure that we foster inclusion in the Intelligent Age. 

 

  1. Legislation 

In 2021, China introduced the Next Generation Artificial Intelligence Development Plan, and earlier this year, Morocco proposed legislation to establish the National Agency for Artificial Intelligence. Lagging behind, as explained by Public Protector Adv Kholeka Gcaleka, South Africa is yet to introduce comprehensive legislation governing the use of artificial intelligence. 

She explained further that AI is particularly concerning in a South African context of inequality. Uncontrolled innovation can lead to a digital divide, entrenching other forms of exclusion. As technology continues to evolve, some learners still do not access basic computer literacy. Further alluded by Communications Specialist Mase Leshilo, this gap threatens to leave marginalised communities behind, as they struggle to catch up with the advances of the second and third industrial revolutions.

To enable inclusion, we often prioritise hard infrastructure, such as telecom towers, and soft infrastructure, like policies and frameworks. We must also recognise the potential of cultural infrastructure to create meaningful impact. The hard and soft infrastructure that govern and support our lives are, at first, shaped though dialogue, engagement, and the shared values and beliefs of a society. These dynamic exchanges represent cultural spaces that we can, and must, nurture through the arts.

Any legislation must ultimately reflect the perspectives of the people. It becomes crucial to amplify diverse voices, and especially the voices of the marginalised. As Rucera Seethal, artistic director of the multi-disciplinary National Arts Festival, emphasised, diverse women must participate in the national conversation occurring in online spaces. By bringing their values, ethics, and voices to online platforms, they will influence generative artificial intelligence, and our infrastructure needs at large.

  1. Education and Business

University students are increasingly questioning the purpose of higher education in an Intelligent Age, where generative AI has abilities to write their assignments and submissions. While this questioning of traditional educational paths is important, we are not adapting the education system quick enough to remain relevant and meaningful. This risks us losing an entire generation to cognitive offloading.

Phuthi Mahanyele-Dabengwa, CEO of Naspers South Africa, emphasised that businesses are being simultaneously reimagined. Organisations are no longer confined by borders or infrastructure as technology enables workplaces to become more dynamic, collaborative, and flexible. Upskilling, continuous learning, and multidisciplinary education are no longer optional but essential investments. Minor tasks and activities will lose value over time but the ability to navigate complexity, identify opportunities, and find creative solutions to pressing problems will become increasingly valued and sought after skills. 

In the Intelligent Age, multidisciplinary education may consider central themes of ethics and social justice. These themes, which offer uniquely human thought processes of empathy and compassion, are not readily generated by AI for contextual understanding.

  1. Bias

“When I say ‘the poor,’ a picture forms in your mind. You’ve already imagined what the poor look like, and they’re usually Black,” explained Nomsa Chabeli, CEO of SABC.

In digital media, algorithms influence the views and perspectives we encounter. For women, hard-won progress made towards gender equality is at risk due to online spaces that radicalise men and women, discouraging their meaningful and insightful exchanges. Public service media forces us to engage with ideas that challenge our own. Supporting the integrity of traditional and digital forms media can ensure that we remain open-minded and curious about different perspectives.

Learning to confront bias and influence perspectives is particularly crucial for women. Noted by Caster Semenya, who faced the harsher side of media scrutiny, her personal resilience and sense of self-worth enabled her to overcome the experience. This is true for many women in leadership, who have achieved success by working hard, inwardly, to overcome bias and metaphorical limitations placed onto them by society. Before they enter, excel in, and lead spaces where few women have gone before, women and girls have built their confidence, embraced self-love, and found courage to be authentic – even when faced with resistance. In spaces where women’s identities, contributions, and perspectives often challenge the status quo, they must show up ready to stay the course. 

Femininity is not something women are born with; it is a social construct that we impose on one another when we expect women to behave and think in certain ways. For example, women are encouraged to be caregivers, supporters, and helpers who anticipate and provide for the needs of others. But when women aspire to leadership – a role that provides vision, direction, and decision-making – it challenges traditional notions of femininity. The women in leadership who are pushing back against these expectations are broadening the concept of femininity, creating space for more women to rise and lead after them.

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