# **2 Context**

I conduct the study with low-income female entrepreneurs in Jordan. In this section, I provide information on the study context as relevant to the experimental design. To do so, I outline an overview on women’s economic participation and digital access in Jordan, and I discuss how online spaces are used by male and female business owners.

## **2.1 Country Setting**

**Women’s mobility and work:** At 15%, Jordan has the world’s third lowest female labor force participation rates (figure A.1). In contrast, men’s labor force participation exceeds 60%, resulting in a striking gender gap in labor supply despite comparable education levels across men and women (figure A.2). With relatively high literacy rates, the underutilization of women’s human capital entails substantial economic losses for them and their households (Ait Ali Slimane, Lundvall, Mohindra, Al Abbadi, Kurshitashvili, and Hisou 2020) and suggests the existence of untapped potential for growth among them.

Existing efforts to explain women’s exclusion from the labor market have highlighted conservative social norms and the lack of flexible work opportunities as main contributors (Kaasolu, O’Brien, Hausmann, and Santos 2019). In a World Bank survey in urban areas of Jordan, 96% of Jordanians agreed that it is generally OK for women to work. However, this rate drops to 54% if women would have to leave their children with relatives, to 38% if women would have to work in mixed workplaces, and further to 26% if women would need return home from work after 5pm (Bank 2018). These rates are consistent with norms around women’s work, as expressed in national surveys in Jordan. Over 80% of Jordanians believe that jobs should be reserved to men if they are scarce, and over 84% report that the children of a working mother suffer (World Value Survey, 2018). Reservations around women’s work are accompanied by restrictive norms on their movement: 80% of men and more than 60% of women believe that women should not be allowed to travel alone. Given the lack of flexible employment in Jordan, as in many developing countries, informal home-based entrepreneurship has emerged as an economic lifeline for women to balance their financial needs with familial and societal constraints on their mobility and work.

**Digital Access:** It is also worth noting that Jordan, like many other countries with young populations, has a relatively high social media penetration rate. About 61% of Jordanians report using Facebook actively and 64% report using WhatsApp (figure A.4). Conditional on access to Internet, these usage rates reach 78% for Facebook and 81% for WhatsApp. Importantly, these usage rates exhibit smaller gender gaps when compared to economic participation rates, although women are slightly less likely to use Facebook, which allows broad exposure, and more likely to use WhatsApp, which requires knowing a user’s phone number to contact her. While only suggestive, these figures imply that gender gaps in economic participation do not fully translate to differential usage of digital platforms.

## **2.2 Online Space Setting**

Next, I document how online spaces are used by business owners in the Jordanian context. In principle, it is not clear that virtual spaces alleviate concerns on female entrepreneurs’ visibility and 6