Artificial intelligence increasingly shapes decisions about access to essential services—from healthcare and education to finance and recruitment. Without deliberate action, these systems risk reproducing or amplifying existing inequalities.
As the international community celebrates Human Rights Day, UNECE highlights the importance of ensuring that emerging technologies uphold equality, dignity and human rights with its new guidance Improving Artificial Intelligence Standards for an Equitable Future.
The guidance provides practical, actionable tools for standards bodies, policymakers, and regulators to embed gender responsiveness, transparency, and human-rights considerations directly into AI standards.
Building on UNECE’s gender-responsive standards leadership
The AI guidance draws on nearly a decade of work under UNECE on gender-responsive standards, which was launched in 2017. This earlier work developed concrete methodologies and justifications for ensuring that technical standards are inclusive and representative of diverse users. These tools also helped create the UNECE Declaration on Gender-Responsive Standards, now endorsed by over 80 standards bodies.
This foundation enabled UNECE to extend gender-responsive methodologies to the rapidly evolving field of AI, where inclusive data, fairness and accountability are central to human-rights-based governance. The 2025 report by the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), Tech and Human Rights Study: Making technical standards work for humanity, recognizes this contribution, noting both the impact of the GRS initiative and the relevance of UNECE’s new AI guidance in strengthening rights-based technical standardization.
New UNECE project to mainstream gender across quality infrastructure for trade
UNECE is also launching a new normative guidance project to mainstream gender equality throughout the entire quality infrastructure system for trade – market surveillance, conformity assessment, accreditation, metrology, and standardization.
This project builds on lessons learned from the gender-responsive standards work and promotes stronger human-rights outcomes across the institutions that shape international trade. The launch meeting will take place on Friday, 12 December 2025, with participation of all interested experts.
Advancing a human-centred digital future
On Human Rights Day, UNECE reaffirms its commitment to ensuring that technological progress is aligned with equality, dignity, and non-discrimination. Through its work on gender-responsive standards, responsible AI, and gender mainstreaming in quality infrastructure, UNECE continues to promote a digital ecosystem that reflects the full diversity of the societies it serves.
