Using Facebook Ad Data to Track the Global Digital Gender Gap
Masoomali Fatehkia,
Ridhi Kashyap and
Ingmar Weber
No rkvb3, SocArXiv from Center for Open Science
Abstract:
Gender equality in access to the internet and mobile phones has become increasingly recognised as a development goal. Monitoring progress towards this goal however is challenging due to the limited availability of gender-disaggregated data, particularly in low-income countries. In this data sparse context, we examine the potential of a source of digital trace `big data' -- Facebook's advertisement audience estimates -- that provides aggregate data on Facebook users by demographic characteristics covering the platform's over 2 billion users to measure and `nowcast' digital gender gaps. We generate a unique country-level dataset combining `online' indicators of Facebook users by gender, age and device type, `offline' indicators related to a country's overall development and gender gaps, and official data on gender gaps in internet and mobile access where available. Using this dataset, we predict internet and mobile phone gender gaps from official data using online indicators, as well as online and offline indicators. We find that the online Facebook gender gap indicators are highly correlated with official statistics on internet and mobile phone gender gaps. For internet gender gaps, models using Facebook data do better than those using offline indicators alone. Models combining online and offline variables however have the highest predictive power. Our approach demonstrates the feasibility of using Facebook data for real-time tracking of digital gender gaps. It enables us to improve geographical coverage for an important development indicator, with the biggest gains made for low-income countries for which existing data are most limited.
Date: 2018-03-06
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-big, nep-ict and nep-pay
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (23)
Downloads: (external link)
https://osf.io/download/5a9e8c10a9181f000f769100/
Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.
Export reference: BibTeX
RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan)
HTML/Text
Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:osf:socarx:rkvb3
DOI: 10.31219/osf.io/rkvb3
Access Statistics for this paper
More papers in SocArXiv from Center for Open Science
Bibliographic data for series maintained by OSF ().