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As use of mobile technologies surges in low and middle income (LMICs) countries, a pressing question has emerged: can the digital revolution be harnessed to empower women – socially, economically and politically - without creating deeper social and gender divides?

This is a particularly critical question in India, where the rates of digital adoption are high – but where the gender gap in digital is among the largest in the world. According to the GSMA, 75% of men but only 55% of women owned a mobile phone in 2020; when it comes to smartphones, the gap is even greater, with only 25% of women owning smartphones compared to 41% of men.

In 2019, ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ Media Action began working on the Digital Women’s Economic Empowerment Project: A Research and Learning Agenda. Our focus has been on women’s collectives, which have shown significant promise as a platform for empowerment. Our objective has been to identify if and how digital technology could enhance pathways to women’s empowerment in collectives, without making existing inequalities and gender-based conflict worse.

The promise of collectives

 from countries around the world, including from self help groups in India, have shown promising outcomes for women’s economic and political empowerment, mobility, and control over family planning. In India, the scale of the opportunity is substantial: Some 47 million member-households have been mobilised into four million self-help groups since 2011, and the National Bank for Agriculture and Rural Development’s Self-Help Group Bank Linkage Programme now covers 138 million families through 11 million groups.

Evidence reviews have also identified three important pathways to empowerment in self-help groups: the accumulation of social capital, human capital, and financial capital.

the expansion of women’s social networks , as they join small groups of 10-12 women and begin benefiting from ‘bonding social capital’ – the social support and trust that cohesive, homogenous groups can provide. Once women start interacting with the wider collective, they begin building “bridging social capital’ – that is, interacting with women from different backgrounds who act as role models and provide access to new ideas and opportunities.

Limits on progress

However, there are constraints on the transformative potential of women’s collectives in India:

• Geographically isolated groups have few opportunities to engage beyond their immediate circle with the wider collective;
• Women have limited channels to request and receive targeted information, resources, and services from the wider collective;
• Grassroots members have limited opportunities to make their voices heard in the wider collective;
• The lack of access to high quality, standardised, flexible learning opportunities;
• Members tend to be older and less educated, and younger women are under-represented;
• There are limited opportunities for consultative decision-making, and leadership may not be transparent.

Digital technology could be a game changer

Chat applications and social media platforms, as social networking tools, could help women’s collectives overcome many of the constraints they face – for example, by:

• Reducing geographical isolation, enabling women to interact more regularly with their wider collectives.
• Improving internal information dissemination and consultative decision making by collective leadership.
• Improving the bottom-up flow of information from grassroots members to collective leadership to transnational partners, amplifying marginalised voices.  
• Diversifying group membership by attracting younger women.
• Helping collectives trying to scale to overcome challenges of transparency and leadership ossification by offering new growth pathways to young and emergent leaders.

Collectives could also use digital technologies to accelerate the accumulation of human capital by providing flexible, personalised digital learning to members, and the accumulation of financial capital by providing greater access to government entitlements and markets for their products and services.

Low tech digital solutions have delivered results

There are already examples of low-tech digital solutions achieving some of these goals for disadvantaged women in India, including for women in collectives. For example:

• , an Interactive Voice Response (IVR) social media platform for rural communities in India, enables women in self help groups to call a number to record an audio message about their community, or to listen to messages left by others. Over 100,000 unique users have been calling Mobile Vaani every month in the states of Bihar and Jharkhand, discussing a wide range of issues and sharing information, including health information during the COVID-19 pandemic.
•  equips women in self help groups who already own smartphones with an application to support claims for government entitlements, helping 600,000 people claim entitlements in 22 Indian states.
• ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ Media Action has used IVR to deliver impactful, cost-effective audio learning to rural, low-income women at scale in India for almost a decade – for example, delivering free health information to over 10 million families, and successfully training 200,000 frontline health workers in 13 Indian states in collaboration with the Indian government, .
• During the pandemic, ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ Media Action began collaborating with capacity building organisations - for instance,  to provide IVR-based learning in agricultural best practices to marginalised women farmers in self help groups in the state of Bihar, and with to support digital adoption and digital literacy in self help groups in Madhya Pradesh.  

The gender digital divide

However, the transformative potential of digital to support women’s empowerment in India is constrained by the gender digital divide, including on social media. In 2018, LIRNEasia estimated that only 9% of women aged 15–65 were using social media in India, compared with 22% of men. In addition, although India is now globally the largest market for platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube, these are still heavily skewed towards male users. For example, according to estimates from publicly available advertising data, only 8% of Twitter users and 24% of Facebook users in India were women, as of January 2021. Even though more women began using the mobile internet during the pandemic, with usage increasing from 21% in 2019 to 30% in 2021, social media use did not reflect this: Facebook usage among women increased by just 1% during the pandemic, and Twitter usage among women fell by 6%.

Social media users in India tend to be younger, better educated, wealthier and urban

Wealth and education are the strongest determinants of access to and use of mobile phones in India, but age and geography also matter. In 2018, a study by LIRNEasia found that only 5% of social media users in India had only a primary school education or had never been to school, and only 11% lived in rural areas. The same study found that only 10% of 36–45-year-olds had used social media in 2018. Although social media use among adolescents in India has increased since then, the gender gap is the most extreme in this age group. For example, a survey by the Population Council in Bihar and Uttar Pradesh in 2018–2019 found that 33% of 15–19-year-old girls who had completed fifth grade or higher had used social media, compared with 70% of boys in the same age group.

Women and men also behave differently on social media in India. Men tend to be more active participants in digital groups than women, with the most active users being men with other forms of social privilege. Most women (92%) use social media to stay in touch with existing friends and family, rather than to make new friends (38%), which could limit their access to new ideas, opportunities and ways of doing things – the accumulation of bridging social capital. 

The role of gender norms

Gender norms - offline and online – are another constraint. Women’s use of mobile phones and the internet are often supervised and monitored by men, which limits the agency and freedom that digital technology could provide women. Technology-facilitated gender-based violence is rife in India, and nearly always against women. Research suggests that over 58% of women internet users have faced online sexual harassment of some form, most commonly on social media. While India has legislation on cyberbullying, cyber-stalking and online sexual harassment, victims of online gender-based violence do not usually seek legal recourse. Social media platforms have been grappling with the issue of online violence since their inception. However, despite best efforts, online violence and harassment remain pervasive issues.

Implications for designing social media interventions for women

The gender digital divide on social media platforms in India, and the offline and online norms that create the divide, necessitate a gender-intentional, research driven approach to designing social media interventions for women’s empowerment. 

• We need to begin with a gender analysis of who has access to digital technology and why, and who is excluded and why.
• We also need to understand women’s level of digital skill among the population we aim to serve, as well as their usage habits and the factors shaping their use, including the implications of shared and supervised mobile phone use for privacy and data protection.
• We need to design differentiated digital strategies, using appropriate digital channels and tools, to meet a diversity of needs.
• We need to use women-centred design methodologies to co-create solutions with women who represent different segments of the target population, to improve accessibility, usability and relevance.
• We must remember that face-to-face communication remains key to women in the target population who don’t own, or have meaningful access to, mobile phones – or the skills or permission to use one.
• We require processes to respond to online harassment and violence that may be triggered by your intervention.
• And we need to be patient. Test and re-test because there is the potential to do as much harm as good.

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The third paper in our learning series offers more insights: 

Learn more about our Digital Women's Economic Empowerment learning and research agenda here. The project is funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and includes partners at Chaitanya WISE, PRADAN, the University of Southern California at Los Angeles, and the University of Denver, Colorado.