Educate, Connect, Employ: Closing Gender Gaps in the Global South

Abstract

Digital technologies are broadly claimed as inclusive technologies enabling the eradication of various social and economic gaps. Our study builds on the hypothesis that growing cross-and within-country digitalization gradually mitigates multidimensional gender gaps of different backgrounds. According to worldwide statistics (WDI, 2025), developing countries severely suffer from gender inequalities (digital, educational and labor), which negatively affect developing economies` development due to keeping women as “overlooked resource” and being ignored as unpaid domestic labor. This work contributes providing evidence on gender gaps in educational and labor market dimensions; but also, by estimating cross-country inequalities in this regard. By estimating the size of gender gaps, we verify if growing digitalization contributes to gender gaps eradication at the country`s individual level in the group of low-income and lower-middle-income countries. We assess whether cross-country divides in terms of gender gaps are growing or diminishing. Using the World Bank (2025) data, we use the sample of 24 low-income and 46 lower-middle-income countries, in the period from 2000 to 2023. We use a panel dataset encompassing 9 variables – extracted from the World Development Indicators 2025, approximating women's and men's access to digital technologies, education and labor market, including composite indicators delivered by the United Nations Development Programme, approximating gender socio-economic discrimination.