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The views expressed below are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy or Harvard Kennedy School. These perspectives have been presented to encourage debate on important public policy challenges.

In recent years, women’s epistemic rights have come increasingly under threat – from their participation in online public discourses to the representation of their ideas and experiences in the collective episteme. Efforts to make women invisible are not new – history has repeatedly shown that records of women’s lives and works have been systematically erased for centuries. Feminist historians and scholars have worked tirelessly to recover and reclaim these lost contributions and have made significant strides in challenging systemic epistemic injustices. However, these efforts now confront an escalating anti-feminist backlash worldwide. In the digital age, new threats to women’s epistemic rights are emerging, further marginalizing feminist issues in online discourse and weakening the information ecosystem concerning women’s rights and histories.

Efforts to make women invisible are not new – history has repeatedly shown that records of women’s lives and works have been systematically erased for centuries.

Historical Epistemic Injustice

The repression of women’s epistemic rights has long shaped how knowledge is created, preserved, and accessed, with patriarchal structures determining what is deemed worthy of documentation and scholarly recognition. Throughout history, women’s contributions to science, politics, and the arts have been dismissed, attributed to male colleagues, or erased entirely from historical records – leaving them absent from collective memory and rendering their influence invisible. But epistemic injustice has also manifested in women's systematic exclusion from knowledge production. They have been denied access to education, intellectual spaces, and academic institutions. Their ideas and contributions were ignored in the canonical body of knowledge, and key aspects of their lives remained understudied and unarticulated. Concepts like sexual harassment and reproductive rights only became recognized when feminist scholars and activists pushed them into public discourse. The  led to severe bias in health care provision that persists to this day.

Addressing the escalating levels of misogynistic online violence is crucial to ensuring that women will be able to participate in democratic online discourses and knowledge production.

Renewed Threats to Women’s Epistemic Rights in the Digital Age

The digital age was once heralded as a democratizing force, yet recent developments have revealed the fragility of women’s representation in the online information ecosystem. A growing number of threats now undermine their ability to access and contribute to knowledge, infringing on their epistemic rights in online spaces.

One of the most concerning factors to the exclusion of women from digital spaces is the escalation of cyber violence. The rise of misogynistic abuse, harassment, and hate against women in online spaces has led many to withdraw from public discourse. This hostile environment is exacerbated by the increasing unwillingness of major social media corporations to regulate content effectively. Recent policy shifts by Meta and X have, facilitating the proliferation of online and offline hate and violence. Online violence directed at women politicians, activists, and journalists has increased significantly in recent years, leading many to disengage from political and public discourse. This not only causes harm at an individual level – impacting their lives and careers – but also has broader implications for women’s epistemic rights when their voices, concerns, and perspectives are silenced in the public sphere.

Another significant factor infringing on women’s epistemic rights is the restriction of their access to online information, particularly regarding issues central to their rights and well-being. The rollback of reproductive rights in the U.S. has been accompanied by the deliberate suppression of online content related to abortion and contraception, preventing individuals from accessing critical health information. This became starkly evident following Trump’s 2025 inauguration, which resulted in the removal of online resources related to women’s and LGBTQ+ rights from government websites. Globally, the political climate has grown increasingly hostile to knowledge that challenges conservative patriarchal narratives, further imperiling access to information on women’s and the LGBTQ+ community’s rights and contributions to society in online spaces with a global audience.

The silencing of women and other marginalized voices threatens to extend to independent knowledge platforms such as Wikipedia. While feminist discourses and women’s historical and public contributions remain underrepresented on the platform, this disparity is at risk of deepening as platforms face increased attacks from anti-feminist actors. Elon Musk’s , calling to defund “Wokepedia,” were followed by a leak of the Heritage Foundation’s plan to unmask anonymous Wikipedia editors and an editorial published in February by the New York Post with the headline “Big Tech must block Wikipedia until it stops censoring and pushing disinformation.”

The epistemic war that the new alliance of tech oligarchs and conservative political forces is waging against feminist knowledge threatens to extend to attacks on journalists and academics writing about women’s and LGBTQ+ issues. Trump’s threats against and , alongside broader conservative efforts to dismantle gender studies education, pose a significant risk to both the production and dissemination of feminist knowledge. These efforts contribute to the erasure of women’s voices, struggles, and achievements from the collective episteme and online public discourse, ultimately infringing on their democratic rights and their ability to shape politics and society actively.

The silencing of women and other marginalized voices threatens to extend to independent knowledge platforms such as Wikipedia.

Strategies for Resistance and Preservation

As these threats intensify, it is imperative to develop and support strategies that safeguard women’s epistemic rights in digital spaces. Decentralized civil society networks play a crucial role in making online knowledge production more inclusive and in preserving information and culture that are under threat of being erased from the internet.

Such strategies include, for example, dedicated to documenting feminist issues and the contributions of women across disciplines. Expanding women’s archives is another vital strategy, ensuring that historical and contemporary feminist knowledge is preserved and remains accessible despite efforts to erase it. The development of decentralized digital archives can serve as a safeguard against state repression, providing alternative means of preserving cultural heritage, intellectual contributions, and politically relevant online information and data. For example, after Trump’s inauguration in February, . Several online archives, such as the, which captures and saves U.S. government websites at the end of presidential administrations, also supported these efforts. Online archives will become increasingly relevant in this new epistemic war, and supporting feminist online communities in building and expanding such archives could make a crucial contribution to safeguarding women’s epistemic rights.

Addressing the escalating levels of misogynistic online violence is crucial to ensuring that women will be able to participate in democratic online discourses and knowledge production. Civil society organizations will play an increasingly important role in this, given the growing unwillingness of social media companies to address this issue. For example, organizations like  support survivors of online violence through personal consultations and litigation financing.

Protecting women’s and other marginalized groups’ epistemic rights in the digital age will also require significant investment in feminist media outlets, independent research institutions, and journalists who continue to cover women’s rights and gender studies and who ensure women’s visibility and participation in public discourse despite political hostility. This will not only be crucial for women's epistemic rights but will also play a vital role in safeguarding the very foundation of democracy in the digital age.

Julia-Silvana Hofstetter, Technology & Human Rights Fellow 2024-2025, Harvard Carr Center for Human Rights Policy