Analysing global professional gender gaps using LinkedIn advertising data

AbstractAlthough women’s participation in tertiary education and the labour force has expanded over the past decades, women continue to be underrepresented in technical and managerial occupations. We analyse if gender inequalities also manifest themselves in online populations of professionals by leveraging audience estimates from LinkedIn’s advertisement platform to explore gender gaps among LinkedIn users across countries, ages, industries and seniorities. We further validate LinkedIn gender gaps against ground truth professional gender gap indicators derived from the International Labour Organization’s (ILO) Statistical Database, and examine the feasibility and biases of predicting global professional gender gap indicators using gender gaps computed from LinkedIn’s online population. We find that women are significantly underrepresented relative to men on LinkedIn in countries in Africa, the Middle East and South Asia, among older individuals, in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) fields and higher-level managerial positions. Furthermore, a simple, aggregate indicator of the female-to-male ratio of LinkedIn users, which we term the LinkedIn Gender Gap Index