# **1 Introduction**

Can digitalization unlock growth for female entrepreneurs? Social norms and household demands often form ‘glass walls’ that restrict women’s mobility and work outside the home (Jayachandran 2021). In France, 14% of the gender wage gap can be explained by differences in men and women’s willingness to commute (Le Barbanchon, Rathelot, and Roulet 2021); in Pakistan, some women have to be paid half of their monthly household expenditure just to cross their village boundary for training (Cheema, Khwaja, Naseer, and Shapiro 2019); and in Saudi Arabia, strong gender norms limit women’s work outside the home, even when households privately support it (Bursztyn, Gonz ́alez, and Yanagizawa-Drott 2020). Around the world, women face substantial mobility constraints, yet few of those living in low-income communities are able to access remote employment from home<sup>1</sup> . Instead, millions of mobility-constrained women resort to home-based entrepreneurship for an economic lifeline<sup>2</sup> . Operating behind closed doors, however, many female entrepreneurs remain particularly market-constrained<sup>3</sup> , selling mostly to friends and neighbors. With this backdrop, digitalization has been proposed as offering virtual windows of opportunities, allowing female entrepreneurs to reach broader markets from home<sup>4</sup> .

Despite increasing access to the Internet in emerging markets<sup>5</sup> , the promise of digital technologies for women in conservative settings remains uncertain. In principle, digitalization might enhance women’s economic outcomes by offering flexibility (Mas and Pallais 2017). In conservative settings, however, this might not be enough. First, if constraints on female entrepreneurs are driven by concerns over their visibility and interactions with strangers, regardless of medium, then virtual spaces might fail to expand their markets. Second, mobility constraints are not randomly assigned. They likely result from norms and preferences that also constrain women’s skills, aspirations, resources, and time (Martinez Dy, Martin, and Marlow 2018). Indeed, if home-based entrepreneurs are subsistence entrepreneurs with limited scope for growth, then the promise of digitalization might fail to materialize among them (Schoar 2010).

In this paper, I shed light on these issues by experimentally investigating the promise of online market access for female entrepreneurs in conservative settings. I do so in the context of Jordan, which, at 15%, has the world’s third lowest female labor force participation rate<sup>6</sup> and one of the highest gender gaps in entrepreneurship<sup>7</sup> . While access to e-commerce has been growing in emerging markets, I focus on the promise of Facebook as a marketplace. With more than 2.93 billion users worldwide<sup>8</sup> , Facebook has become one of the most accessible digital platforms in low and middle income countries<sup>9</sup> and is often used by business owners to reach customers<sup>10</sup> .

To understand how female entrepreneurs use virtual markets in conservative settings, I start by

> 1Brussevich, Dabla-Norris, and Khalid 2020

> 2Bank 2023

> 3Hardy, Kagy, and Jimi 2022

> 4OECD 2022, Pergelova, Manolova, Simeonova-Ganeva, and Yordanova 2019

> 5Poushter, Bishop, and Chwe 2018

> 6World Bank, ILOSTAT database (last accessed in November 2023)

> 7World Bank, We-Data: Measuring the gap in female entrepreneurship around the world (2022)

> 8Meta Reports, First Quarter of 2022

> 9Pew Research Center (2016)

> 10The use of social media for ‘informal online commerce’ has been documented in Pakistan, Bangladesh, Myanmar (Roest and Bin-Humam 2021), Indonesia (Melissa, Hamidati, and Saraswati 2013, Wahyuningsih and Mustaqim 2021), Egypt (Beninger, Ajjan, Mostafa, and Crittenden 2016), and Tunisia (Brahem and Boussema 2022)

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