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Measuring Subnational Digital Gender Inequality in India through Gender Gaps in Facebook Use

Published: 20 June 2018 Publication History

Abstract

Improving digital literacy and reducing gender inequalities in internet access and use have been recognized as important development targets within the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Tracking progress on digital gender inequalities however is challenging due to limited gender-disaggregated data, especially in less developed country contexts and at the subnational level. We show how data obtained from social media advertising APIs can be used to generate a real-time measure of digital gender inequality. Using data from the Facebook (FB) Marketing API, we document gender gaps in FB use across Indian states and examine to what extent state-level development indicators help predict these gender gaps. Higher GDP per capita, literacy and internet penetration are associated with lower gender gaps in FB presence. These state-level development predictors however are only able to explain a small proportion (7.3%) of the overall variation in gender gaps on FB. Employment-related occupational or industry characteristics from within FB emerge as important variables associated with more gender-balanced FB use.

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cover image ACM Conferences
COMPASS '18: Proceedings of the 1st ACM SIGCAS Conference on Computing and Sustainable Societies
June 2018
472 pages
ISBN:9781450358163
DOI:10.1145/3209811
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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Publication History

Published: 20 June 2018

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Author Tags

  1. Facebook
  2. gender gaps
  3. internet access
  4. now-casting

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COMPASS '18
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COMPASS '18: ACM SIGCAS Conference on Computing and Sustainable Societies
June 20 - 22, 2018
CA, Menlo Park and San Jose, USA

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Cited By

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  • (2024)An analysis of predictors and wealth-based inequality in internet use among women in India: aiming for better digital health outcomesBMC Digital Health10.1186/s44247-024-00090-z2:1Online publication date: 10-Jul-2024
  • (2024)Spatial Spillover of the Global Internet Penetration Rate and the Digital Gender DivideSage Open10.1177/2158244024125544814:2Online publication date: 27-May-2024
  • (2023)Monitoring Gender Gaps via LinkedIn Advertising Estimates: the case study of ItalyProceedings of the 15th ACM Web Science Conference 202310.1145/3578503.3583629(229-238)Online publication date: 30-Apr-2023
  • (2023)Socially sustainable smart cities: mapping the research trends by co-word analysisOpen House International10.1108/OHI-10-2022-024749:2(315-339)Online publication date: 9-Jun-2023
  • (2023)Revisiting the Measurement of Digital InclusionThe World Bank Research Observer10.1093/wbro/lkad00739:2(289-318)Online publication date: 18-Oct-2023
  • (2022)Mobility Privilege and COVID-19: Determinants of a Spatially Differentiated Experience in the Lockdown-ed Delhi RegionSouth Asia Multidisciplinary Academic Journal10.4000/samaj.8421Online publication date: 15-Dec-2022
  • (2022)Mapping urban socioeconomic inequalities in developing countries through Facebook advertising dataFrontiers in Big Data10.3389/fdata.2022.10063525Online publication date: 21-Nov-2022
  • (2022)Digital EpidemiologyHandbook of Computational Social Science for Policy10.1007/978-3-031-16624-2_15(279-303)Online publication date: 14-Sep-2022
  • (2021)Examining Global Mobile Diffusion and Mobile Gender Gaps through Facebook's Advertising DataProceedings of the 32nd ACM Conference on Hypertext and Social Media10.1145/3465336.3475120(287-290)Online publication date: 30-Aug-2021
  • (2020)Monitoring global digital gender inequality using the online populations of Facebook and GoogleDemographic Research10.4054/DemRes.2020.43.2743(779-816)Online publication date: 8-Sep-2020
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