Internet Gender Gaps

The Internet GG - ITU shows the ratio of female-to-male internet use from International Telecommunication Union (ITU) statistics. These are available for the fewest countries and are infrequently updated.

The Internet GG – Online shows the ratio of female-to-male internet use estimated using the Facebook Gender Gap Index (see below for more information) by country. These estimates are available for the largest number of countries and are available with daily frequency.

The Internet GG – Combined shows the ratio of female-to-male internet use estimated using the Facebook Gender Gap Index by country combined with other offline indicators on the country’s development status such as its Human Development Index. This model is our best-performing model in terms of its fit with ITU statistics, and these estimates are available for more countries than ITU statistics. Their geographical coverage is not as wide as that of the Online Model Prediction and the underlying information used to generate these predictions is only annually updated.

The Internet GG – Offline shows the ratio of female-to-male internet use estimated using only offline indicators on the country’s development status such as its Human Development Index. Estimates from these models have the worst fit with ITU statistics on the internet GG, and the underlying data used to generate these are updated with an annual or longer frequency.

Mobile Gender Gaps

The Mobile GG – GSMA shows the ratio of female-to-male internet use from published Global System for Mobile Communications Association (GSMA) reports. These are available for the fewest countries and are infrequently updated.

The Mobile GG – Online shows the ratio of female-to-male mobile use estimated using the Facebook Gender Gap Index (see below for more information) by country. These estimates are available for the largest number of countries and are available with daily frequency, although their fit with GSMA statistics is worse than the other two models.

The Mobile GG – Combined shows the ratio of female-to-male mobile use estimated using the Facebook Gender Gap Index by country combined with other indicators on the country’s development status such as its Human Development Index. Estimates from these models are closer to GSMA statistics on the mobile GG, and available for more countries than GSMA statistics, but not as many as those from the Online Model Prediction.

The Mobile GG – Offline shows the ratio of female-to-male mobile use estimated using only offline indicators on the country’s development status such as its Human Development Index. The underlying data used to generate these are updated with an annual or longer frequency.

The Facebook Gender Gap Index

We track the global aggregate numbers of female and male users of Facebook every day available through the marketing API. Using these aggregate numbers, we generate the “Facebook Gender Gap Index”, an indicator of the number of female-to-male Facebook users in a country. While the Facebook Gender Gap Index reflects gender gaps in who has Facebook accounts and not internet use per se, we have found the Facebook Gender Gap Index is highly correlated with statistics on internet (from the ITU) and mobile phone gender gaps (from the GSMA) collected via surveys, for the countries for which these data are available.

Looking at statistics of gender gaps in Facebook users can help us predict gender gaps in internet use, but as data on Facebook users are available for many more countries than statistics from the ITU, we can expand geographical coverage of this indicator by using the online data.

Offline Indicators

Our dataset uses a number of country-level development indicators (e.g Human Development Index, Gross Domestic Product (GDP) per capita) and global gender gap indicators in other domains (e.g literacy). For more information see our paper.