by Claudia C. Lodia

GenderIT.org's recent interview with Anita Gurumurthy gives a strong feeling for the call to continue engaging the work of Heike Jensen in internet governance. Jensen's work urges us to remember that the gender equality agenda is not simply to be a "marginal add-on" to the political field of internet governance but, to be engineered strategically into media and ICT goals.¹Some of the key components of the gender equality agenda include, women's right to respectful representation, women's access to the media and ICTs they wish to use, and true and full participation of women in decision-making positions in the respective business and governmental institutions.² These components have been part of the driving force towards the construction of a global normative framework of women's human rights and gender equality since the UN world conference on women in 1975. By 1995, feminists and gender equality advocates assumed a formal commitment to help implement what materialized as a mandated global strategy of gender mainstreaming. Intended to "make women's as well as men's concerns and experiences an integral dimension of the design, implementation, monitoring and evaluation of policies and programmes [sic] in all political, economic and societal spheres," this strategy was to critically consider the inter-national, inter-regional, inter-cultural, and digital differences that run deep between women and men around the globe. Gender mainstreaming did not only set up the ways for institutions - business and state - to oppose gender biases and inequalities by incorporating a gender perspective in all institutional policies. It also helped the women's movement to organize and promote women's participation and empowerment through media and ICT practices from the ground up.