Analysing global professional gender gaps using LinkedIn advertising data

Abstract Although women’s participation in tertiary education and the labour force has expanded over past decades, women continue to be underrepresented technical managerial occupations. We analyse if gender inequalities also manifest themselves online populations of professionals by leveraging audience estimates from LinkedIn’s advertisement platform explore gaps among LinkedIn users across countries, ages, industries seniorities. further validate against ground truth professional gap indicators derived International Labour Organization’s (ILO) Statistical Database, examine feasibility biases predicting global using computed population. find that are significantly relative men on countries Africa, Middle East South Asia, older individuals, Science, Technology, Engineering Mathematics (STEM) fields higher-level positions. Furthermore, a simple, aggregate indicator female-to-male ratio users, which we term Gender Gap Index (GGI), shows strong positive correlations with ILO gaps. A parsimonious regression model GGI predict enables us expand country coverage different indicators, albeit better performance for general than Nevertheless, predictions generated population show some distinctive biases. Notably, where there is greater inequality internet access, data equality truth, indicating an overrepresentation high status these settings. Our work contributes growing literature seeking harness ‘data revolution’ sustainable development evaluating potential novel source filling monitoring key linked economic empowerment.