The Best Practice Forum on Gender and Access: Empowering Women Online

A Need for More Gender-Disaggregated Data

While Internet access and use is rapidly growing all over the world, women still face several challenges that hinder them from benefiting meaningfully from it. The proportion of women able to access and use the Internet is 12% lower than the proportion of men accessing and using it worldwide. This gap is even bigger in developing countries where only one out of seven women use the Internet.

These numbers highlight some of the discrepancies that the digital gender gap is both producing and reproducing. However, understanding them and to what extent they affect women’s online lives requires more data. While many studies have been conducted in the last few years in order to gather evidence about the existing barriers, there are still many aspects of the phenomenon that need to be studied in-depth, particularly at grassroots levels.

Various recent efforts – including those of the W20, the UN Broadband Commission on Sustainable Development, the Alliance for Affordable Internet (A4AI), the World Wide Web Foundation, the GSMA and Association for Progressive Communications – have expressed concerns about the paucity of gender-disaggregated data and insights on Internet access and use masks the true extent of Continue reading