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Gender inequality online is ‘expensive for all of us,’ says web inventor’s foundation

Tim Berners-Lee’s Web Foundation hopes governments will be spurred to act upon seeing the economic cost of the digital gender divide.

This story is part of Crossing the Broadband Divide, CNET’s coverage of how the country is working toward making broadband access universal.

When women and girls don’t have access to the internet, it costs governments a lot of money. How much money, exactly, has only been estimated, until now.

New research released Monday by Tim Berners-Lee‘s Web Foundation and its subsidiary, Alliance for Affordable Internet, has calculated that over the past 10 years, 32 low- and middle-income countries have lost $1 trillion by not helping more women get online. Some of those countries include India, Nigeria and the Philippines.

The digital divide is a global problem, but there are still distinct groups that are less likely to have access to the internet. These groups can be defined by their geography, their gender, their race, or all three. Women in low- and middle-income countries are even less likely to have internet access than their male counterparts.

“This report reveals just how expensive gender inequality is for all of us,” Boutheina Guermazi, director of digital development for the World Bank, said in a statement. “For governments looking to build a resilient economy as part of their COVID-19 recovery plans, closing the digital gender gap should be one of the top priorities.”

In the 32 countries the Web Foundation looked at in its report, just over a third of women had access to the internet, compared with almost half of all men. And this divide doesn’t seem to be closing over time, even as digital connectivity plays an increasingly central role in our lives. The coronavirus pandemic has shown how vital it is to have access to internet at home, for everything from remote school to health care. Over the past decade, the gap between the number of women and men online has dropped by only half a percentage point, the Web Foundation’s research says.

The lack of internet access for women means many are excluded from education and employment opportunities, which often keeps them in poverty or other dangerous situations, without access to health care or other assistance. That alone should be enough for governments to want to try to close that gender divide, but that hasn’t always been the case.

Inclusive broadband policies for economic gains

With its new report, the Web Foundation is laying out the cost of the digital gender divide in stark economic terms, in the hope it’ll be the push that governments need to take the problem seriously. According to the report’s calculations, closing the digital gender gap in the next five years could help generate an enticing $524 billion for the economies of the countries studied.

“It is not just good social policy, but it’s also good economics … to include women and girls in the online world,” Teddy Woodhouse, the Web Foundation’s senior research manager for access and affordability, said in an interview. For him, the big test of the report will be whether the information awakens new allies and helps move the needle in closing the digital gender gap. “It’s really trying to be quite practical and thinking about how can we build a case for change,” he said.

Focusing on the broad financial implications is also a way to ensure that the digital gender divide isn’t dismissed by those in power, as gender equality debates so often are, added Ana MarĂ­a RodrĂ­guez PulgarĂ­n, one of the report’s co-authors.

“Sometimes our gender discussions are with politicians that are already working on gender equality, closing the digital gender divide and all that,” she said. “But I think we want to bring the message that this will affect everyone.”

One of the main problems identified in the research as holding women back from getting on the internet is a lack of gender-responsive broadband policy — explicit targets for ensuring women have internet access.

Governments interested in narrowing the digital gender divide have a number of areas to choose from where they implement policy, including rights, education, access and content. Woodhouse pointed to Costa Rica as an example of a country that has implemented such measures by specifically setting targets for getting more women into STEM.

Every year Costa Rica publishes a report on how it’s meeting the targets. “That’s only possible if you’re setting those indicators in the first place,” said Woodhouse. It’s an example of how creating systems of accountability can be best practice.

Internet access beyond the binary

The Web Foundation’s research on gender has focused on traditional male-female lines and doesn’t incorporate the experiences of trans or nonbinary citizens. The “crucial problem” with expanding the research, Woodhouse said, is data availability. Even getting data that’s been broken down enough to show the discrepancy between the experience of cisgender men and women (people whose personal identity and gender correspond with their birth sex) has been challenging, he added.

“To then get data that is disaggregated even more comprehensively, is essentially nonexistent in most contexts, and particularly in the economic context we’re looking at of low- and middle-income countries,” he said. In some countries, being transgender is illegal and punishable by jail time or other serious measures, making the tracking of different genders impossible.

The lack of data is something Woodhouse hopes will change. But, he added, the overall goal of the research remains the same.

The aim is that we will “see less of the idea that gender should predetermine what rights someone should have, what kind of experiences they should have, what kind of access to the internet,” Woodhouse said. “That’s going to be a net benefit for everyone.”

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Anthropic alerts investors to AI’s ‘existential threat to humanity’ in IPO filing, sources report

Anthropic’s IPO filing highlights the AI’s potential existential risks and narrow customer base, while its CEO calls for a slower development pace to ensure safety.

Anthropic plans to warn speculative investors in its IPO prospectus that its AI models pose a “catastrophic or existential risk to humanity,” several reports said on Tuesday.

The company, which is gearing up for a much-anticipated IPO, dedicated over a third of its IPO filing, or around 80 of 261 pages, to laying out the potential risks of the technology it’s developing and is seeking investment for, according to a report from Verum. It only used 48 pages to discuss its actual business.

The five-year-old company, known for its frontier language model Claude, warned that AI can have “self-preserving behaviors,” including being able to “resist shutdown,” “conceal or manipulate information,” and carry out behaviors “resembling blackmail,” per the Verum report.

The company is pursuing a $2 trillion valuation when it goes public and reported in the filing that it made a net loss of $42 billion in 2025. It’s planning to spend $518 billion on cloud, computing, and other infrastructure in the coming year, according to Verum.

Anthropic also warned that its customer base is extremely narrow, with nearly a quarter of its revenue last year coming from just two clients, two people familiar with the filing told the Financial Times.

AI safety guardrails

Anthropic’s co-founder and CEO Dario Amodei has previously written various essays warning on the threats of AI, including saying the technology will cause “unusually painful” disruption to the job market.

In another recent essay, the CEO urged the AI industry to slow the pace of AI model development, with a three-step plan to reduce how quickly models get better without “sacrificing commercial advantage or the United States’ lead in AI.”

Those calls for a slowdown are somewhat of a “head scratcher” for the sector, to which the market has reacted “pretty resoundingly,” Dan Ives, partner and senior managing director at Yorkville Ives told CNBC earlier today.

“You need guardrails from a safety perspective, but the fact for Anthropic and OpenAI to slow down, if they slowed down, China would just accelerate and win, and I think that’s part of this quagmire that you’re seeing is that there’s some regulatory capture going on. There’s definitely a game of poker, but for Anthropic, they got to continue to put foot on the pedal.”

Ives added that while guardrails are essential, regulation could stifle innovation. That continues to be the “biggest concern within the U.S., which is why we’re in an F1 race,” he said.

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U.S. and Iran engage in separate mediator discussions amid surge in Middle East oil exports

U.S. and Iranian officials held separate indirect talks mediated by Qatar as Middle East crude exports neared wartime highs, while Tehran awaits a U.S. response to its cease‑fire and sanctions‑relief proposal.

On Monday, American and Iranian representatives engaged in distinct indirect negotiations mediated by third parties, aiming to halt seven months of hostilities while Iran awaits Washington’s reply to an updated cease‑fire proposal and Middle Eastern oil shipments reach wartime peaks.

Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi met with Qatari mediators in New York, staying on after the UN General Assembly, and indicated he anticipates a U.S. response by Tuesday. “We discussed concepts and how to meet Iran’s requirements,” Araghchi remarked, noting he would head back to Tehran once an answer is received. “When the Qataris have a reply, they know how to deliver it to us.”

The Iranian plan, initially unveiled during the sidelines of last week’s UN General Assembly, asks the United States to unfreeze Iranian assets, remove oil sanctions and lift the naval blockade of Iranian ports within four to five days, and to commence nuclear negotiations within a week. Tehran links any resumption of traffic through the Strait of Hormuz to the fulfillment of those conditions.

On Sunday, President Donald Trump dismissed the proposal as “unacceptable,” asserting that Iran seeks a rapid agreement due to economic strain. Speaking at the White House on Monday, Trump noted that U.S. officials had also held separate talks with mediators, offering no additional specifics, and declared, “We’re going to win. It’s going to happen fast.”

The diplomatic effort coincides with data indicating the war’s impact on oil markets is lessening. Middle Eastern crude exports have risen this month to near their highest point since the conflict started in February, according to Kpler. The firm noted in a Monday briefing that exports are “just under 80% of pre‑conflict levels.”

The Strait of Hormuz remains far from usual activity. Kpler’s real‑time monitoring recorded a flow of 10,591 kilobarrels per day through the strait on Saturday, compared with a prewar baseline of 17,133 kilobarrels per day.

The ongoing impasse is influencing U.S. fuel markets, where retail diesel prices linger close to a record $6.53 per gallon. The Trump administration is reconsidering an export ban, having recently distanced itself from an earlier iteration of the idea; Kpler estimates such a ban would retain about 1.2 million barrels per day domestically, potentially straining storage capacity.

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Saudi Red Sea export rebound pushes oil prices down

Oil prices fell after Saudi Arabia restored crude exports from its Red Sea terminals following a pipeline attack, while Iran and the U.S. continue talks over the Strait of Hormuz.

Oil prices fell on Tuesday as Saudi Arabia’s crude exports from its Red Sea ports recovered from an attack on a key pipeline earlier this month. The decline reflects renewed flow from major loading points.

Satellite imagery confirmed a “major operational recovery” at the Yanbu and Muajjiz terminals, according to a Kpler note released on Tuesday. The data shows that 12.5 million barrels were loaded onto nine tankers at Yanbu between Saturday and Monday, restoring activity after a drone strike disrupted the East‑West pipeline earlier in the month.

Riyadh has brought the pipeline’s throughput back to roughly 3.5 million barrels per day, people familiar with the matter told The Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg News on Monday. The line’s maximum capacity is 7 million bpd, indicating that the current flow is about half of its peak.

Meanwhile, U.S. and Iranian officials spoke with mediators on Monday as they attempt anew to negotiate a deal to end the seven‑month conflict. Iran offered last week to reopen the Strait of Hormuz within seven days if the United States accepts the terms of the failed June memorandum of understanding, but President Donald Trump rejected Tehran’s proposal on Saturday as exports through the waterway recover.

Oil flows through Hormuz have averaged 13.2 million barrels per day over the past week, according to Kpler data—about 77 % of the 17 million bpd that moved through the strait before the U.S.–Iran war. The U.S. military continues to protect tankers from Gulf allies and maintains a blockade on Iranian exports.

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