Use of Mobile Phones by the Rural Poor: Gender Perspectives from Selected Asian Countries

"Mobile phones have been shown (though not uniformly) to positively contribute in various ways to rural development, from reducing information asymmetry, improving functional networks, to increasing access to services and finance. Yet a digital gender divide exists."

This paper attempts to shed light on potential gender differences in mobile ownership, accounting for the urban/rural setting as one of the factors that determine ownership. In the context of the fact that women comprise 43% of the world's agricultural labour force and yet do their work in the context of a digital divide, the two studies in this report from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), the International Development Research Centre (IDRC), and LIRNEasia use empirical quantitative surveys as well as qualitative fieldwork from a cross-section of developing economies in South and South-East Asia.

The first study is an empirical investigation of the digital gender divide among the economically poor (broadly called the Bottom of the economic Pyramid, or BOP) from urban and rural perspectives. The study uses a 6-country dataset from 2011 that tried to understand mobile phone access and use at the BOP. Using 2011 data, which is shared in detail for each of 6 countries throughout the paper, the Teleuse at the Bottom of the Pyramid 4 (Teleuse@BOP4) study was conducted in Bangladesh, India, Indonesia, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and Thailand and is representative of BOP teleusers (those who have used a phone at least once in the previous three months). The study finds that despite mobile phone ownership being greater among urban dwellers when compared to rural dwellers, location is not a statistically significant predictor of ownership. This was the case for five of the six study countries, with the exception being Indonesia (Java only), where mobile phone ownership among urbanites was found (with a 95% confidence interval) to be 66.9% more likely than among rural dwellers. The study also found that mobile phone ownership among women was less likely than among men; these results were statistically significant, even after controlling for a variety of variables, such as income, education, and employment. For example, provided that all other variables are fixed, being a female in Pakistan has a negative effect of 84% on mobile ownership (see Table 14). Gender disparity in terms of mobile ownership is nearly 36% in that country (see Figure 12). This is the highest gender difference when compared to the other five countries investigated in this study. The only country where the gender divide was reversed was Thailand, where women were 42.9% more likely than men to own mobile phones. This contradicts recent studies that found that when one accounts for education, income, and employment, it is women who are more active users.

The second study looks at the results of qualitative fieldwork that sought to explicate and provide greater context to the findings from the previous survey. Focus group discussions from Indonesia and Sri Lanka revealed that women and men tended to use the phone for different purposes, and the utility that men and women derived from access and use of a mobile phone varied. The varied perceptions on the use and ownership of mobile phones have one common underlying thread: that mobile phones are a normal facet of modern life, be it in rural or urban areas, among men or women, young or old. (This is not surprising; the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) estimates [PDF] that in 2015, there were more than 7 billion mobile cellular subscriptions worldwide.) Collectively, the experiences shared by the study participants portray the mobile phone as more than just a communication tool, though ultimately that is its main benefit to them. By enabling the continuation of relationships with friends, relatives and colleagues, their phone enabled them to maintain social networks with greater ease than having to depend on face-to-face communication. However, despite its wide-spread commonality, there were some differences in perception between respondents of different genders and between urban and rural dwellers. For example, men seemed to have greater decision-making power regarding a phone purchase, even for their spouses. Rural phone owners were sometimes less cost-conscious than urban dwellers of how they used their phone because they felt a greater need for it. That said, "[the concerns, needs and benefits ascribed to the phone are more a reflection of the existing societal, familial and gender norms prevalent in their environment, rather than having been elicited by the mobile phone. The phone is, in their perception, an enabler of extant human need and desire rather than the creator of them."

From these two studies, the report concludes that the digital gender divide exists and cannot be explained by differences in income, education and/or employment factors. "We can see in our sample the strong effect of education on mobile ownership, especially in Bangladesh, India and Pakistan. But that does not mean that improving education alone would decrease the digital gender divide." Given that the survey findings differ from those of other researchers (e.g., Hilbert, 2011), this suggests that country and local socio-cultural contexts inhibit a more generalisable action plan for reducing the digital gender divide. "This necessitates a country-specific policy (rather than a generic one) with regard to reducing (and ultimately eradicating) the digital gender divide."