Digital Gender Gap in Pakistan: Men Dominate The Charts in All Categories

Pakistan has approximately 3.5 times more male Facebook users than female users, which indicates a gender gap of 70 percent in Facebook usage, while the financial gender gap is 64 percent, according to the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA).

The country currently has over 46 million social media users, making up around 21 percent of the total population, and almost 99 percent of them access social media on mobile phones.

PTA stated that with only 0.7 percent of the female population having credit cards, the use of e-Commerce platforms is impossible unless they use Cash on Delivery (COD) or other money transfer channels like Jazz Cash, Easy Paisa, etc. Women in Pakistan make a meager 3.3 percent of the total online transactions but the spending on consumer e-Commerce categories depicts fashion and beauty on the top with $2.75 billion spent, showing year-over-year growth of 85 percent in 2020, as reported by Hootsuite.

In the financial sector, gender parity positively influences the ability to seize available economic opportunities. Pakistan’s statistics in terms of gender participation in the financial sector are rather dismal. Only 29 percent of adult women have a bank account, as per the State Bank of Pakistan (SBP), 25 percent own a mobile handset (from 46 million mobile owners in Pakistan), and 18 percent have digital banking accounts.

Women’s Branchless Banking (BB) accounts stand at 18.8 million against the 55.7 million accounts held by men. The digital financial gender gap in Pakistan is 64 percent, and the SBP states that incorporating a gender perspective in the existing policies will allow Pakistan to have an inclusive financial system that serves women and men equally.

To this effect, the SBP has launched a Credit Guarantee and Refinance Scheme that offers a zero percent refinance rate and 60 percent risk coverage for small businesses run by women entrepreneurs. It is also working on a revolutionary gender mainstreaming policy called ‘Banking on Equality’ in consultation with other stakeholders to engender equality in banking and reduce the gender gap in financial inclusion.

Although they are aware of the potential benefits of the Internet, Pakistani females cannot use it primarily due to low levels of literacy, inadequate ICT skills, low affordability, and being financially dependent on members of their families. Moreover, local socio-cultural norms often lead their families to disapprove of them using the Internet for a variety of reasons, including safety and security.

Regardless, due to their low literacy rates, the possibility of women using the Internet through platforms that offer voice facilities and images instead of written content can be tapped.

Furthermore, mobile broadband is available to 77 percent of Pakistan’s population, and there were over 100 million mobile broadband subscribers in FY 2020-21 with a broadband penetration of 46 percent, of which 21 million were female subscribers. Based on female subscribers, penetration stands at 20 percent.

Data from the GSMA, the Pakistan Bureau of Statistics (PBS), and a recent Google survey showed that 19 percent, 14 percent, and 39 percent of women respectively use the Internet. Pakistan Social and Living Standards Measurement (PSLM) 2020 states that almost 43 million people in the country use the Internet for various purposes, including Facebook, Skype, education, research, information seeking, business, watching movies, online shopping, and banking.

The PSLM Household Survey 2021 released by the PBS revealed that 46 percent of the country’s population (25 percent female and 65 percent male) owns a mobile phone. In terms of the rural-urban divide, the gap between male-female mobile phone ownership in rural areas is much higher than in urban areas.

Female mobile ownership in Sindh, Punjab, and Khyber Pakhtoonkhwa is almost the same — between 23 percent and 29 percent, but is relatively lower — 15 percent only — in Balochistan.



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