# **7 Conclusion**

As social media usage rates escalate in developing countries, it is increasingly important to understand how these accessible technologies impact the livelihoods of people around the world. While social media platforms’ use for marketing has been associated with individuals and firms in relatively rich countries, diverse qualitative work highlights that low-income women in conservative contexts use them to maintain their livelihoods. In this paper, I provide causal evidence on the impact of social media on aspiring and existing female entrepreneurs in Jordan, a relatively conservative country.

First, I investigate whether virtual market access can meaningfully increase female entrepreneurs’ productivity, with a focus on women with limited mobility. Though online qualitative work, I find that female entrepreneurs marketing on Facebook often choose to conceal parts of their identities: they hide their names, pictures, and post in closed female-only trading groups. These practices suggest that gender norms around women’s visibility and mixing are mirrored online, but that women find ways to work within these by creating ‘safe spaces’ to operate and trade with each other. Next, in an experiment, I give Jordanian female microentrepreneurs access to online storefronts through business pages on Facebook, marketing outsourcing, and digital marketing training. The bundled intervention aims to increase businesses’ market access without increasing their owners’ personal visibility. I find that within 6 months of support, treated participants were more likely to have a surviving business after 6 months of support and reported higher revenues, more online and diverse clients, and less informal practices with customers through store credit. Looking at heterogeneous treatment effects, I find that the effects are higher among mobility-constrained women, and particularly those with relatively high skills among them.

While this study takes place in a conservative setting, mobility constraints are faced by women across the cultural and economic spectrum. In the US, for example, women created half of new businesses in 2023 for the third year in a row, up from 29% in 2019 just before the COVID-19 outbreak. Surveys have highlighted the need for flexibility as the number one reason for starting a business, shedding light on entrepreneurship’s central role in providing alternative employment for mobility-constrained women. In such contexts, social media might provide higher market exposure more flexibly, therefore lowering the cost of entry for new businesses.

Finally, when considering policy implications from the presented results, several issues have to be taken into considerations. First, while the experiment shows a positive impact of market access outsourcing, we cannot rule out displacement effects without a clustered randomized control trial. Indeed, although respondents are located in different places across the country, it is possible that some of the gains in the treatment group came at the expense of businesses in the control group. Still, the results suggest potentially better matching across firms and customers as high productivity entrepreneurs increase their market exposure. Additionally, the results have important distributional effects, with higher revenues going to low-mobility women. Second, while the intervention is not cost effective for the average participant given noisy estimates on profits, targeting low mobility and high quality entrepreneurs could be. Finally, the results highlight the increasingly important role that technology companies can play in supporting marginalized communities. Features like ‘Pages You May Like’ on Facebook, for example, provide advertisement to business pages free of charge. Expanding these services in conservative countries might be particularly helpful to low-mobility female entrepreneurs.

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