International Gender Differences and Gaps in Online Social Networks

Article 1 of the United Nations Charter claims "human rights" and "fundamental freedoms" "without distinction as to [...] sex". Yet in 1995 the Human Development Report came to the sobering conclusion that "in no society do women enjoy the same opportunities as men" 1. Today, gender disparities remain a global issue and addressing them is a top priority for organizations such as the United Nations Population Fund. To track progress in this matter and to observe the effect of new policies, the World Economic Forum annually publishes its Global Gender Gap Report. This report is based on a number of offline variables such as the ratio of female-to-male earned income or the percentage of women in executive office over the last 50 years. In this paper, we use large amounts of network data from Google+ to study gender differences in 73 countries and to link online indicators of inequality to established offline indicators. We observe consistent global gender differences such as women having a higher fraction of reciprocated social links. Concerning the link to offline variables, we find that online inequality is strongly correlated to offline inequality, but that the directionality can be counter-intuitive. In particular, we observe women to have a higher online status, as defined by a variety of measures, compared to men in countries such as Pakistan or Egypt, which have one of the highest measured gender inequalities. Also surprisingly we find that countries with a larger fraction of within-gender social links, rather than across-gender, are countries with less gender inequality offline, going against an expectation of online gender segregation. On the other hand, looking at "differential assortativity", we find that in countries with more offline gender inequality women have a stronger tendency for withing-gender linkage than men. We believe our findings contribute to ongoing research on using online data for development and prove the feasibility of developing an automated system to keep track of changing gender inequality around the globe. Having access to the social network information also opens up possibilities of studying the connection between online gender segregration and quantified offline gender inequality.