Facebook ’ s gender divide

Online social media are information resources that can have a transformative power in society. While the Web was envisioned as an equalizing force that allows everyone to access information, the digital divide prevents large amounts of people from being present online. Online social media in particular are prone to gender inequality, an important issue given the link between social media use and employment. Understanding gender inequality in social media is a challenging task due to the necessity of data sources that can provide unbiased measurements across multiple countries. Here we show how the Facebook Gender Divide (FGD), a metric based on a dataset including more than 1.4 Billion users in 217 countries, explains various aspects of worldwide gender inquality. Our analysis shows that the FGD encodes gender equality indices in education, health, and economic opportunity. We find network effects that suggest that using social media has an added value for women. Furthermore, we find that low values of the FGD precede the approach of countries towards economic gender equality. Our results suggest that online social networks, while suffering evident gender imbalance, may lower the barriers that women have to access informational resources and help to narrow the economic gender gap. 1 ar X iv :1 71 0. 03 70 5v 1 [ cs . C Y ] 1 0 O ct 2 01 7 The Web was designed to be universally accessible and open, carrying the promise of equal opportunity in the access to online information and services [4] as the great potential equalizer [14]. However, despite the widespread adoption of the Web and other Information Communication Technologies (ICT), online access and presence are heterogeneous across demographic factors such as income and gender –a phenomenon called the digital divide [5, 8, 19]. Governments and global organizations express their concern about the digital divide, aiming to connect the 4 Billion people that remain offline [23, 13]. However, the effects of increasing Internet penetration in development are rarely backed up against empirical data [10], and the latest report by the World Bank suggests that unequally distributed growth in Internet penetration might exacerbate socio-economic inequalities [13]. Among online resources, social media play a key role in economic development, for example by providing information that facilitates finding employment [6, 12]. An important open question is whether equality in the access to social media can work as a digital provide [16], bringing equality in other social, political, and economic aspects of society. The World Wide Web Foundation reports that one of the key elements in the digital divide is gender inequality [26]. Gender-based online violence and sexual harassment are pervasive phenomena across countries and can drive gender inequality in activity even when access is equally available across genders, generating gender divides that demand research [26]. Empirical analyses of social media data show the traces of gender inequalities, from content biases and activity on Wikipedia [25, 21] to visibility and interaction disparities on Twitter [11, 18]. To properly understand the digital divide, a pervasive problem in crosscountry comparisons is the limited size of country samples and the challenges to generate unbiased survey data [13]. To overcome this issue, we deployed a novel technical infrastructure to collect large-scale data from the Facebook online social network, as explained more in detail in the Materials and Methods section. We generated a dataset with the total amount of registered users and daily active users of each gender in each country, covering a total of 217 countries and more than 1.4 Billion users (more details in Supplementary Information). Our dataset allows the quantification of Facebook activity ratios of each gender in each country. From them, we calculate the Facebook Gender Divide (FGD) as the logarithm of the ratio between the activity ratios for men and for women (see Methods for more details). The FGD has a value below zero when women tend to be more active on Facebook that men, a value close to zero for equal activity tendencies, and a positive value when men are more active on Facebook than women in a country. We combine this data with standard socio-economic indices, including Gross Domestic Product (GDP) per capita, Internet penetration (IP), and economic inequality, as well indices from the World Economic Forum Gender Gap Report that measure gender equality in terms of education, health, political participation, and economic opportunities.