In light of the recent International Women’s Day a new report seeks to tackle the gender gap between men and women and mobile phone usage.  The focus is on countries with earners of low and middle income.

The survey of 2000 women in Kenya, Bolivia, India and Egypt covered interviews with telecommunications leaders and academics, outside statistical analysis, and statistics from the United Nations.  The report found:

“A woman is still 21% less likely to own a mobile phone than a man. This figure increases to 23% if she lives in Africa, 24% if she lives in the Middle East, and 37% if she lives in South Asia. Closing this gender gap would bring the benefits of mobile phones to an additional 300 million women.”

Reasons as to why the Mobile Gender Gap exists and what it means for women around the world are as follows:

“To quantify the gender gap, one must understand the breakdown of male and female subscribers. Today, 1.4 billion, or 48% of the 2.9 billion males in low and middle income countries, benefit from mobile phone ownership. In contrast, just 1.1 billion, or 38% of the 2.9 billion females in these countries have mobile phones. This equals a mobile phone gender gap of 300 million women. […] Of the remaining 3.3. billion citizens of low and middle-income countries, there are 750 million females, or 26% of all female who could – but do not yet – benefit from mobile communications.” (meaning that others are outside of mobile network coverage, or are under the age of 14 or over the age of 74).

Closure of this gender gap could see mobile phone revenues increases by US$13billion.

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