Title: Facebook's gender divide,
Abstract: Online social media are information resources that can have a transformative
power in society. While the Web was envisioned as an equalizing force that
allows everyone to access information, the digital divide prevents large
amounts of people from being present online. Online social media in particular
are prone to gender inequality, an important issue given the link between
social media use and employment. Understanding gender inequality in social
media is a challenging task due to the necessity of data sources that can
provide unbiased measurements across multiple countries. Here we show how the
Facebook Gender Divide (FGD), a metric based on a dataset including more than
1.4 Billion users in 217 countries, explains various aspects of worldwide
gender inequality. Our analysis shows that the FGD encodes gender equality
indices in education, health, and economic opportunity. We find network effects
that suggest that using social media has an added value for women. Furthermore,
we find that low values of the FGD precede the approach of countries towards
economic gender equality. Our results suggest that online social networks,
while suffering evident gender imbalance, may lower the barriers that women
have to access informational resources and help to narrow the economic gender
gap.