The Digital Gender Gaps project seeks to deepen data and empirical evidence through two complementary streams of research:

1. Map and understand gender gaps in digital connectivity and social media use, leveraging a range of datasets including social media, geospatial and population survey and census datasets at national and subnational levels. The map and indicators shown on our web app are one of the outcomes of our ongoing research;
2. Study the impacts of digital information and capabilities on women’s economic and social empowerment outcomes in a cross-national, comparative perspective, especially focusing on low- and middle-income country contexts. To study these links between digital expansion and empowerment outcomes, we rely on geospatial augmentation of secondary survey datasets and quasi-experimental strategies to help generate an evidence base for understanding if, how and when digital technologies can help achieve wider social impacts.

The project is led by the Department of Sociology and Leverhulme Centre for Demographic Science, University of Oxford in collaboration with the Societal Computing Group at Saarland University, and the Department of Business Economics, Health, and Social Care (DEASS) of University of Applied Sciences and Arts of Southern Switzerland (SUPSI). For more information about ongoing research, contact Principal Investigator, Ridhi Kashyap (Oxford) at ridhi.kashyap@nuffield.ox.ac.uk.

A selection of our publications:

• Fatehkia, Masoomali, Ridhi Kashyap, Ingmar Weber. 2018. Using Facebook ad data to track the global digital gender gap. World Development 107:189-209. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.worlddev.2018.03.007
• Breen, Casey F., Masoomali Fatehkia, Jiani Yan, Xinyi Zhao, Douglas Leasure, Ingmar Weber, and Ridhi Kashyap. 2024. Mapping Subnational Gender Gaps in Internet and Mobile Adoption Using Social Media Data. Working paper. https://doi.org/10.31235/osf.io/qnzsw
• Kashyap, Ridhi, Masoomali Fatehkia, Reham Al Tamime, Ingmar Weber. 2020. Monitoring global digital gender inequality using the online populations of Facebook and Google. Demographic Research 43: 779-816. https://www.jstor.org/stable/26967824
• Kashyap, Ridhi and Florianne Verkroost. 2021. Analysing global professional gender gaps using LinkedIn advertising data. EPJ Data Science, 10(1), p.39. https://doi.org/10.1140/epjds/s13688-021-00294-7
• Alexandra Tyers-Chowdhury, Gerda Binder, Ridhi Kashyap, Mariana de Araujo Cunha, Reham Al Tamime, Ingmar Weber. 2021. Using big data for insights into the gender digital divide for girls. UNICEF Gender and Innovation: Evidence Briefs. https://www.unicef.org/eap/reports/innovation-and-technology-gender-equality-1
• Koebe, Till, Theophilus Aidoo, Ridhi Kashyap, Douglas R. Leasure, Valentina Rotondi, and Ingmar Weber. 2024. Social capital mediates knowledge gaps in informing sexual and reproductive health behaviours across Africa. Social Science & Medicine 357: 117159. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0277953624006129
• Rotondi, Valentina, Ridhi Kashyap, Luca Maria Pesando, Simone Spinelli, and Francesco C. Billari. 2020. Leveraging mobile phones to attain sustainable development. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 117, no. 24 (2020): 13413-13420. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1909326117
• Rotondi, Valentina, Francesco Billari, L. Pesando, and Ridhi Kashyap. 2020. Digital rural gender divide in Latin America and the Caribbean. IICA/IDB/IFAD Report. https://iica.int/en/press/news/digital-exclusion-obstacle-hinders-rural-womens-work

Funding

We are grateful to funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (INV-045370), the Leverhulme Trust (Grant RC-2018-003) for the Leverhulme Centre for Demographic Science and Leverhulme Prize, Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) Impact Acceleration Account (IAA) (2021-22), and to a Data2X ‘Big Data for Gender’ grant (2017-2020), and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation and its founder, the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung).