Abstract
Although women’s participation in tertiary education and the labour force has expanded over the past decades, women continue to be underrepresented in technical and managerial occupations. We analyse if gender inequalities also manifest themselves in online populations of professionals by leveraging audience estimates from LinkedIn’s advertisement platform to explore gender gaps among LinkedIn users across countries, ages, industries and seniorities. We further validate LinkedIn gender gaps against ground truth professional gender gap indicators derived from the International Labour Organization’s (ILO) Statistical Database, and examine the feasibility and biases of predicting global professional gender gap indicators using gender gaps computed from LinkedIn’s online population. We find that women are significantly underrepresented relative to men on LinkedIn in countries in Africa, the Middle East and South Asia, among older individuals, in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) fields and higher-level managerial positions. Furthermore, a simple, aggregate indicator of the female-to-male ratio of LinkedIn users, which we term the LinkedIn Gender Gap Index (GGI), shows strong positive correlations with ILO ground truth professional gender gaps. A parsimonious regression model using the LinkedIn GGI to predict ILO professional gender gaps enables us to expand country coverage of different ILO indicators, albeit with better performance for general professional gender gaps than managerial gender gaps. Nevertheless, predictions generated using the LinkedIn population show some distinctive biases. Notably, we find that in countries where there is greater gender inequality in internet access, LinkedIn data predict greater gender equality than the ground truth, indicating an overrepresentation of high status women online in these settings. Our work contributes to a growing literature seeking to harness the ‘data revolution’ for global sustainable development by evaluating the potential of a novel data source for filling gender data gaps and monitoring key indicators linked to women’s economic empowerment.
Highlights
Over the past decades, with the expansion of women’s participation and completion of tertiary education, women’s ability to access professional occupations and managerial positions in labour markets has increased [1, 2]
By comparing against ground truth data, our analysis enables us to address whether online gender gaps on LinkedIn broadly reflect professional gender inequalities in the labour force across countries, or whether gender gaps observed on LinkedIn reveal unique gender biases and selection effects, and if so, how these are patterned
The analysis we have presented provides one particular snapshot or cross-section, and our correlations show that online gender gaps capture cross-country variation in professional gender gap indicators in the International Labour Organization (ILO) ground truth well
Summary
With the expansion of women’s participation and completion of tertiary education, women’s ability to access professional occupations and managerial positions in labour markets has increased [1, 2]. Despite these improvements in (2021) 10:39 education, women continue to be underrepresented in technical and managerial occupations requiring specialised, tertiary-level education. In the majority of the 67 countries with data from 2009 to 2015, fewer than a third of senior- and middlemanagement positions were held by women [4]. These gender inequalities emerge from a complex interplay of factors, such as differences between men and women in human capital and fields of study, gender discrimination and negative stereotypes associated with women in professional roles, challenges in combining work and family life that disproportionately disadvantage women, limited access to social capital, networks and resources for professional advancement, and gender differences in values and interests [5,6,7,8,9,10]
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