The link between female access to Internet and GDP

Just over ten years ago Intel, the US computer parts manufacturer, published a groundbreaking report detailing the extent of what is dubbed the “Internet gender gap” – the lack of access females have to the world wide web.

The report was a call to action to double the number of women and girls online in “developing countries from 600 million today to 1.2 billion in 3 years”.

One might expect a silicon chip producer to push for greater access to computers, but the research came of the back of academic research that projected that seeing another 600 million women – 40% percent of women and girls in developing countries – with access to the Internet could potentially contribute up to $18bn to annual GDP across 144 developing countries.

A developing lag
To place this into context, a decade ago the developing world had nearly 25% fewer women than men have access to the Internet, and the gender gap soars to nearly 45% in regions such as sub-Saharan Africa, according to Intel’s report. Further, the study found that one in five women in India and Egypt believes the Internet was “not appropriate for them”.

Roll on to 2024 and the picture looks different. Flare Data’s analysis of more than 50 developing countries, using extensive World Bank data, shows some very positive evidence that the Internet gender pay gap in developing countries is narrowing and has been at a dramatic pace.

Further examination of the relationship between female access to the Internet and GDP growth reveals strong positive correlations*. In short, greater access for to the Internet for females could well be a dominant factor in a country’s ability to growth economically. 

Take Indonesia, for example. A country with a population of around 275 million, in 2014 female access to the Internet was hovering at around 15% (for men it was closer to 20%) whereas today it’s approximately two thirds. In that time GDP per capita has gone from just over US$10,000 to US$15,600.

With data spotty in certain developed countries, it’s harder to draw country-specific conclusions, but even so the indications are positive. Take Zimbabwe. In 2014, female access to the Internet was around 14% and by 2020 that had risen to 30%. In step, the country’s GDP per capital by around one third (albeit from a small base).

Don’t stop looking at the data
However, it should not be taken for granted that access to the Internet will always rise. Despite very positive data coming from countries like Egypt, where between 2014 and 2020 access to the Internet more than doubled to just over 70%. In 2022, the World Bank reported that number dropping to 65%. And while there is no surface evidence this has had a subsequent impact on economic growth, it will be important to keep an eye on future developments here.

But let’s be certain on one point, where there is the data, the evidence is strong: where females (and males, to be clear) have greater access to the Internet there is a strong positive correlation to increased wealth per capital in developing countries – very much as was predicted more than a decade ago.

 *For the sake of analytical expediency, Flare Data adopted a simple Pearson correlation method to measure the relationship between two independent World Bank indicators. Numbers have been rounded up.