The importance of gender data
Susan Gigli, Global Lead, and Samuel Schueth, Research Director - International Development Practice, Kantar Public
Recent years have seen the growth of digital platforms potentially offering new employment opportunities women in low and- middle-income countries. To maximise these opportunities, policy makers need to ensure that appropriate gender-specific policies and business models are in place and they also need robust data to track women’s participation and experience.
In this article, Susan and Samuel explain how the challenges in accessing appropriate data may create a risk to inclusive economic growth, and what measures could be put in place to address these.
Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 5 calls for achieving gender equality and empowering all women and girls. Recognising that gender equality is a fundamental human right, reducing gender inequality also makes economic sense. Gender inequality in earnings has substantial economic costs, leading to an estimated US$23,620 in loss of wealth per person globally.1 The World Bank Group affirms that no country, community, or economy can achieve its potential nor meet the challenges of the 21st century without the full and equal participation of women, men girls and boys.
Yet, currently women are both under-represented in the labour force (in developing countries, women account for a third or less of human capital wealth) and earn far less than their male counterparts (globally, human capital wealth could increase by 21.7% in earnings with gender equality).2
One area that is potentially promising for women’s economic inclusion and empowerment is the global megatrend towards digital platform work and the ‘gig economy’.3 Labour markets in low- and middle-income countries have long been characterised by high rates of informal labour. Platform work represents an opportunity to formalise informal labour, lowering barriers to entry, and benefiting workers.
It promises to efficiently match labour supply with demand for services, and to provide greater access to finance and other enabling conditions for entrepreneurial success. Above and beyond the matching of drivers and passengers via global platforms like Uber, local online platforms, such as Indonesia’s GoJek, are connecting buyers and sellers of all types of services. The trend towards platform work is gaining momentum in developing countries along with smartphone adoption and the rise of middle-class consumption.
Women in particular stand to benefit from platform work. Traditionally they have been more excluded than men from the formal economy; and as digital work is often conducive to working from home and with part-time or flexible working hours, it can be easier for women to balance work with domestic responsibilities.4
Although digital platforms offer potential benefits to women in low- and middle-income countries, there is a real risk that they may be left even further behind if these platforms are not accompanied by gender-specific and gender-sensitive policies, business models and platform design.
Women face many of the same barriers in the digital world as they do in the formal economy. These barriers include gender discriminatory laws, harmful social norms and societal expectations to take on a larger share of unpaid household work, lower access to finance, weaker peer networks, and a general lack of self-confidence.5
Women also face additional technological barriers in accessing the digital economy. Globally, women are 26% less likely than men to have a smartphone, they have lower access to the internet, and feel less confident using the internet.6 The mobile gender gap is largest in South Asia where in 2019, women were 23% less likely to own a mobile phone, and 51% less likely to access the internet on a mobile phone.7
Closing the gender gap in Sri Lanka through the ride-hailing industry
Our recent study on women and ride-hailing in Sri Lanka clearly demonstrates the potential gains of gender-inclusive strategies to both businesses and women in the digital economy.
This research – conducted by Kantar Public in partnership with the International Finance Corporation and the ride-hailing company PickMe – aimed to identify barriers and opportunities for women as drivers as well as riders, and to explore how the country’s ride-hailing industry could contribute to closing the gender gap in both mobility and labour force participation.8
The findings highlight the importance of ride-hailing to women’s access to work and overall mobility, helping them overcome transportation barriers. While women account for only 38% of riders, those using ride-hailing services are at least 40% more likely than men to use it as their primary mode of transport. They also outnumber men in rides taken during day-time hours, particularly valuing the safety and price transparency of ride-hailing.
In terms of drivers, the research captures the many challenges women face in becoming drivers and in being able to earn as much as men. For example, women are constrained by their limited hours available to drive and by lack of access to vehicles and finance. Yet, the number of women drivers and their wage-earning potential are steadily growing, and women drivers are rated highly, especially by women riders.
In conclusion, the study sets out that product and service innovations aimed at attracting more women drivers and riders could increase overall revenues from ride-hailing by as much as 27%.
As digital platforms enable employment and provide new opportunities for women around the world – and increasingly in developing countries – capturing data on the specific experiences, barriers and opportunities for women, will be essential to inform policies and business strategies that promote inclusive growth. To address gender inequality, evidence is needed on:
However, these data are seldomly captured, and policy and decision makers cannot act on gender equality when they cannot fully see gender inequality.
As part of our study in Sri Lanka, in order to gain insight into the different experiences of men and women in ride-hailing, we needed to be able to analyse data on drivers and riders from the PickMe platform. However, it is not industry standard to sex-disaggregate user data. To conduct the analysis, the project team worked to combine areas where the company already had access to gender-flagged user data, with approaches that filled in data gaps.
For instance, the occasional gaps in the gender field for drivers could be addressed by checking data from drivers’ licences. Missing or incorrect data in the gender field of passengers is more common and more challenging to verify. The project team was able to glean gender proportions in the platform data by cross-referencing publicly available social media profiles, while maintaining the anonymity of the passengers. Company data was also triangulated with the results of detailed surveys of over 1,000 riders and drivers.
By combining these approaches, the project team was able to produce the first-of-its kind analysis of women’s engagement with ride-hailing in Sri Lanka. The final analysis provided a granular view of the different travel and spending patterns among men and women, their different experiences, and what changes would help increase the number of female drivers and riders, while at the same time improving PickMe’s business performance.
Without the gender-disaggregated data, the opportunities for gender-inclusive strategies and business earning potential would have been obscured.
Over the past 20 years, there has been a growing recognition of the need to capture gender-disaggregated data as part of a broader imperative to integrate gender into standard measurements and statistics.9 When it comes to research that both informs and measures the impact of gender-inclusive strategies in the digital economy, challenges take on new dimensions. Ideally, such research would provide critical evidence on the different experiences of men and women, but in practice this is not straightforward:
Digital platforms don’t always capture data on the gender of its sellers or customers
When a field on gender is included, it isn’t necessarily completed – either because it’s overlooked or because some sellers or customers want to remain anonymous
The global adoption of data protection regulations makes it more difficult to link digital platform data and survey data without revealing personal data
There are, of course, solutions to these challenges. Companies can use analytical techniques such as machine learning to make inferences about the gender of its user base.10 11 They can run user surveys that ask for respondents’ gender and then weight the survey data to estimate the number of male and female sellers and customers.
Another option is to estimate gender proportions by looking at individuals who synced their social media profiles with the given digital platform – as we did for our study on women and ride-hailing. Whilst linking survey responses on attitudes and experiences to individual user data can provide powerful insight, researchers need to ensure they don’t reveal or share any personal data.
Robust evidence is essential to monitor and evaluate progress (or lack of) in inclusive economic growth. However, in today’s digital age, new approaches are needed that integrate gender-disaggregated platform data with data from other sources. These new approaches come with their own set of methodological, technological, operational and ethical challenges. Both digital platform companies and policy makers have important roles to play in ensuring that gender-disaggregated data is available to track progress towards equality.
Only then will we be able to effectively overcome the disadvantages of women entrepreneurs and consumers; promote the gender-inclusive design of digital platforms, products, services and business models; and ultimately advance women’s economic well-being in the developing world.
Unrealized Potential: the high cost of gender inequality in earnings, World Bank (2018)
As above
Platform work is a form of employment that uses an online platform to match the supply of and demand for paid labour.
Bridging the digital gender divide, OECD (2018)
An operational guide to women’s entrepreneurship programs in the World Bank.
The Mobile Economy: Asia Pacific, GSMA (2020)
Women and ride-hailing in Sri Lanka – 2020 IFC report: Research conducted in collaboration with the IFC and PickMe, and funded by the IFC’s Women in Work Program, Sri Lanka, in partnership with Australia’s Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade.
Notable players in advocating for and advancing gender disaggregation in statistics include the NGO data2x, the United Nations Statistics Division; the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation; US Agency for International Development; UK Foreign Commonwealth and Development Office (formerly DFID), among many others.
API platform= Application Programming Interface
See, for example, https://gender-api.com/en/
