Examining Global Mobile Diffusion and Mobile Gender Gaps through Facebook's Advertising Data

Social media advertising data, particularly data from Facebook's advertising platform, have been successfully used for monitoring population and development indicators, with an emphasis on monitoring digital gender inequality. This paper contributes to this literature by assessing the feasibility of the attribute of user behavior of "using a mobile device for X months" available from Facebook's advertising platform to understand short-term global mobile diffusion dynamics and mobile phone gender gaps. We compare this attribute with other features of the platform to form a better understanding of the data and the digital behaviours they capture, and show how this Facebook attribute relates to mobile phone penetration rates and gender gaps in mobile access. We find that this "Uses a mobile device (X months)" advertising targeting attribute can be used as a proxy for changes in mobile phone penetration rates, especially among younger users, and that it captures cross-national variation in mobile gender gaps. We further find that countries with larger gender gaps disfavoring women are comparatively more gender-equal among the most recently joined cohort.