Responsible Design Through Care: A Relational Framework for Gendered Harm

Gender-based harm online is often addressed through individualised safety tools, content moderation mechanisms, or compliance-driven governance, with responsibility framed through abstract ethical principles and narrow performance metrics. This position statement argues that such approaches insufficiently account for the institutional relationships, dependency conditions, and accountability gaps through which harm is produced, normalised, and left unresolved. Building on an integrated body of work that includes several peer-reviewed articles and editorials, this paper draws on a structured review of 308 technology design studies (2010–2023) showing the dominance of utilitarian, deontological, and virtue-ethical framings, alongside focus group research with 110 marginalised women in Brazil navigating high-stakes digital services under conditions of institutional mistrust, harm and power asymmetry. Together, these studies motivate care ethics as a foundational design and governance orientation for developing sociotechnical imaginaries of responsibility. For the workshop, this position statement contributes a conceptually grounded and empirically informed account of why prevailing “responsible design” ethics in HCI and IS often fail women in practice, and what a care-ethical alternative makes possible. It offers: (1) a systematic critique of dominant ethical framings that disembed design from social and institutional structures; (2) a relational, care-ethical framework with implications for trust, empowerment, and engagement; (3) an empirically grounded care chain model linking design to organisational response; and (4) actionable pathways and prompts to support collective reflection on responsible, gender-aware sociotechnical design.