Seminar Series - “Measuring global gender inequality indicators using large-scale online advertising data”

Although the SDGs come with several indicators against which countries ought to measure their progress, existing data sources to measure this progress, especially in relation to gender equality, are often (i) outdated, (ii) lacking international comparability, (iii) lacking appropriate disaggregation, or (iv) missing completely. These problems are particularly acute for less developed countries.

In this talk, Dr Ridhi Kashyap will describe how anonymous, aggregate data from the online advertising platforms of Facebook, Google and LinkedIn can be leveraged and combined with conventional data sources from surveys to measure and ‘nowcast’ gender inequality indicators globally. With the widespread adoption of these online platforms, real-time aggregated demographic information about their user base, usually made available to advertisers on these platforms, can be repurposed by researchers as a type of digital census. Although these data have widespread geographical coverage, cover large numbers of users, and are available with low latency, they are non-representative. Dr Kashyap will illustrate the process of using and validating such non-representative data to measure global gender gaps in: i) internet and mobile phone use, ii) post-secondary education, iii) skilled occupations.