A research team comprised of current and alumni members of the Leverhulme Centre for Demographic Science (LCDS) has published a major new study in PNAS revealing where and to what extent women remain excluded from the digital world.
The paper, “Mapping sub-national gender gaps in internet and mobile adoption using social media data”, provides the most detailed picture to date – and the first-ever subnational estimates -- of the digital gender divide across low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). The study estimates gender-specific rates of internet use and mobile phone ownership, and gender gaps, for more than 2,000 sub-national regions across 117 LMICs between 2015 and early 2025. These estimates are also the first subnational estimates of digital gender gaps.
The research finds that women are about 19 % less likely to use the internet and 8 % less likely to own a mobile phone than men—equivalent to around 320 million fewer women online and 190 million fewer women with a mobile phone. Strikingly, the authors show that inequalities within countries are often as large as those between countries, with gaps exceeding 30 percentage points between the most and least connected regions in over 40 nations.
The LCDS-affiliated team—Professor Ridhi Kashyap, Dr Casey Breen, Dr Douglas Leasure, Ms Jiani Yan, and Dr Xinyi Zhao together with their international collaborators Mr Masoomali Fatehkia from Qatar Computing Research Institute and Professor Ingmar Weber from the Saarland University —combined novel data sources, including social media indicators and geospatial information, with machine-learning models to generate fine-grained, sub-national estimates. Their work advances digital demography by using big data to monitor gender inequalities in near-real time.
This paper underscores the importance of subnational data for a more complete understanding of inequality in digital adoption, especially in countries with the lowest overall levels of human development. The estimates provide a valuable lens for researchers and policymakers through which to assess areas that stand to benefit from the increasing rollout of digital programmes within global development policies, as well as those at risk of being left behind.
The study’s data are openly available via the Digital Gender Gaps Dashboard, enabling policymakers and researchers to explore gender disparities in digital access by country and region.
- Read the full paper in PNAS: https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2416624122
- Explore the interactive data: https://digitalgendergaps.org
