Oliver Rowntree is Senior Insights Manager in the Connected Women Team at the GSMA. The GSMA represents the global mobile communications industry and each year it releases a study on the mobile gender gap. The study is out today, and Oliver is on the podcast to tell us about its findings on the difference in mobile ownership between men and women and the rapid changes taking place in access to mobile internet. We talk about what the mobile gender gap means for finance, the arrival of hybrid smart-feature phones, and why we should all be paying attention to women’s use of video calls.
Oliver is Senior Insights Manager with the Connected Women team at the GSMA. Oliver leads the programme's research and analysis on the mobile gender gap, and is the author of the annual Mobile Gender Gap Report series. He works with the mobile industry across Africa and Asia to provide insights that inform new approaches to driving greater digital and financial inclusion of women through mobile.
Take a look at the full Mobile Gender Gap Report 2020 on the GSMA website: www.gsma.com/r/gender-gap/
You can read more about the importance of video calls in South Asia, particularly for women: www.gsma.com/mobilefordevelopme…-women-south-asia/
Let me know your ideas and reactions to the podcast on twitter or by email: feministfinancepodcast@gmail.com
Alice Merry:
Welcome to the podcast that takes a feminist look at the world of money. My name is Alice Merry, and this is The Feminist Finance Podcast.
Alice Merry:
Today I have the chance to speak with Oliver Rowntree. Oliver is Senior Insights Manager in the Connected Women team at GSMA. GSMA is the organization that represents the worldwide mobile communications industry. And every year, Oliver releases a report that examines the mobile gender gap, the gap in access to mobile phones and mobile services between men and women. That report is out today and Oliver has come onto the podcast to give us an idea about their findings around the mobile gender gap and particularly the big changes that they're seeing around women's access to mobile internet. It's fascinating stuff. I learned a lot from recording the episode. I hope you will too.
Alice Merry:
Hi, Oliver, welcome. Thank you very much for joining us today on The Feminist Finance Podcast. It's great to have you here.
Oliver Rowntree:
Hi, Alice. It's my pleasure to be on. Thanks for having me.
Alice Merry:
Oliver, perhaps you can start by telling everybody what is the mobile gender gap and how is it that GSMA is measuring this gap?
Oliver Rowntree:
Yeah, absolutely. The mobile gender gap in general is sort of, perhaps intuitively, the gender gap in access to and use of mobile services, whether that be ownership of a mobile phone, of a smart phone, or access to mobile internet or indeed to mobile money services. So, we've been tracking this on and off over the last 10 years, but in particular over the last three years we've been publishing an annual report series, the Mobile Gender Gap Report series. This year having three years of comparable data, we're really able to start to dig into some of the trends over that time and sort of tracking how the gender gap is changing over time. How women's access to and use of mobile is evolving relative to men's. And sort of starting to pick out some of the interesting trends.
Oliver Rowntree:
I should say, all of the findings that I'm talking about here are based on a consumer survey that we conduct across a range of low- and middle-income countries in Latin America, Sub-Saharan Africa, and South and Southeast Asia. So typically, when we're talking about country level results, that's derived from those countries that we survey specifically. But we also sort of construct an econometric model that allows us to extrapolate those results out and arrive at figures that cover a low- and middle-income countries overall.
Alice Merry:
As you know, a lot of the people who are listening to this podcast are working in the financial services. And as I mentioned, I think this is a real treasure trove for people who in financial services it. We're good to hear it from you. Why do you think people in financial inclusion, people in the finance sector should care about the mobile gender gap?
Oliver Rowntree:
Well, I think there's really one clear reason, which is that mobile money is becoming an increasingly critical driver of financial inclusion, particularly for women in low- and middle-income countries, which are the regions that we focus on in our report. So for the unbanked mobile money can be a more accessible alternative for having some form of financial inclusion, accessing basic sort of transfers, but also potentially opportunity to save and take out loans and access to a mobile money agent might be much more possible than access to a bank branch or something like that.
Oliver Rowntree:
Looking at the data from the Global Findex from the World Bank, we are seeing that particularly in Sub-Saharan Africa, mobile money is playing an important role in reducing the gender gap in account ownership in many countries across the region. That's kind of the big area of overlap in terms of the topics, but I think it's really important to bear in mind that on that sort of user journey to mobile money access, owning a mobile phone is really a really critical first step that can often be overlooked. And the fact that there remains a gender gap and even access to a basic mobile phone, let alone a smartphone, let alone access to the internet really is something that should not be forgotten by the financial inclusion community by the wider development community.
Oliver Rowntree:
Although the spread of mobile technology is remarkable, it is not yet equal. And so, it is something that needs to be noted as a really critical first step on the user journey towards a wider suite of digital and financial services. The development of financial inclusion community needs to work together to address and understand those basic mobile access gaps as well as those kinds of gaps further along the journey.
Alice Merry:
And the research that you've done really lays out that journey really powerfully, I think. It's one thing as you say, to own a phone. It's another thing perhaps to have internet. It's another thing to be using that phone for really vital services. And it's really interesting to see how men and women's use differ along that user journey.
Alice Merry:
Now for the really interesting bit, what are the results this year? So, as you mentioned your three years in, I think. You've had three years seeing this whole landscape evolve. What does the report tell us this year?
Oliver Rowntree:
Well, there's some areas where we're seeing some really important changes and some areas where we're seeing more continuity and change not happening as fast as we'd like. The sort of the exciting areas where we're seeing the most changes, from our data we are seeing a reduction in the mobile internet gender gap across low- and middle-income countries. So, we found this year that there's a 20% gender gap in mobile internet access across low- and middle-income countries, which is still considerable, but that's a reduction of seven percentage points over the last two years that we've been tracking that. That really represents many, many millions more women are now able to use mobile internet and that really substantial closure of the gap over a relatively short period of time. Really quite impressive pace of change.
Oliver Rowntree:
But we do see that the underlying gender gap in mobile ownership is moving less quickly. So, we found this year an overall gender gap across low and middle income countries of 8%, which is down slightly from what we'd seen previously of around 10% in previous years. But we're not really seeing that as an ongoing trend quite yet. So those remaining unconnected in terms of basic mobile ownership are proving hard to reach. These are those who are sort of more rural, less educated, and absolutely disproportionately female. It's not necessarily an easy problem to solve in the short term.
Alice Merry:
What we should think of, I suppose, is that the group of women who had already in previous years gained access to mobiles are making that shift to mobile internet. But the group that hadn't yet had any access to mobiles is remaining that way, and that's proving a really stubborn problem to solve, I suppose.
Oliver Rowntree:
Yeah, by and large. And the really unfortunate thing about that is that it's often those women who stand to benefit the most from mobile ownership and use. These are women who maybe don't have access to many of the services that you could gain access to via digital inclusion. They don't have access by any other means. So, it's really worth the effort, but to focus on them if we want to deliver impact via digital inclusion.
Alice Merry:
Could you talk about that a bit more because I imagine some people listening might be thinking poor rural women have more pressing problems than not having a mobile. What is it about mobile and mobile services that's so important to that group of women?
Oliver Rowntree:
That's a great question because of course we're not arguing that anybody should be prioritizing owning a mobile phone over pressing day-to-day concerns and prioritizing buying a phone over prioritizing basic education or food or anything like that. But there are some crucial things that mobile ownership does allow and does facilitate for one thing. Of course, in markets where mobile money is prevalent, financial inclusion via a mobile phone can really be a game changer. It can allow for savings via mobile money to sort of protect against unexpected shocks. It can allow for the receipt of money from say family overseas or family that's moved to cities. So that can be a really, really important game changer.
Oliver Rowntree:
But also, what shouldn't be understated is just the value of connectivity and the value of being able to stay in touch with family for somebody who feels potentially isolated or cut off from family that may be dispersed. So, we try not to diminish the value of what basic connectivity can offer as well. Also of course that can be used to support somebody's business or to find job opportunities. So even basic connectivity can be hugely valuable in the right circumstances.
Alice Merry:
And I suppose one of the most obvious reasons that comes to mind why people wouldn't have this kind of services is that mobile phones are expensive, smartphones with access to internet or even more expensive. But are there other reasons why women aren't adopting mobile phones or aren't adopting mobile internet?
Oliver Rowntree:
Yeah, absolutely. I mean there's a lot of factors that go into it. In many ways the mobile gender gap reflects wider structural inequality and imbalances that disproportionately affect women. So, on average women's lower levels of education in many countries or lower levels of literacy or more restricted income or financial autonomy. Of course, affordability is a huge consideration. And, in many regions, we see underlying social norms play a huge role in this as well. So, we consistently see the wide gender gap of any region as being South Asia. And when we dig into that, that often is closely related to restrictive social norms where access to a mobile and access to mobile internet can really be associated with certain freedoms and access to information which can be deemed inappropriate for women, particularly in more rural socially conservative contexts.
Oliver Rowntree:
But we track and try and quantify the top barriers to mobile ownership and mobile internet over time. It can be hard to capture and distil in a quantitative way some of those barriers, but we do see quantitatively that affordability remains the top barrier for both men and women owning a mobile phone. Those that don't currently own one. Whereas for mobile internet, awareness of mobile internet is still really critical and there's a big gender gap in the awareness of both the internet and the fact that it can be used on a mobile phone, but that gap is reducing quite quickly and a lot more people are becoming aware of the internet as a concept.
Oliver Rowntree:
Amongst those who are aware of it, literacy and digital skills for both men and women is the top barrier across the countries that we look at. That is to say specifically having the skills to be able to use a mobile phone or use the internet, but also just having basic literacy skills, an absence of which really can be prohibitive. Although not entirely prohibitive, but for many use cases does prohibit gaining value from the internet.
Oliver Rowntree:
We're seeing people increasingly find the internet to be more relevant to their lives when they are aware of it. A sense that the internet is not relevant had previously been a very strong barrier to people. But we've seen that decline over time.
Alice Merry:
It's really interesting to hear what you mentioned about social norms being more of a barrier in certain areas. And I imagine maybe digital literacy is more important in some places than others. Could you talk a bit more about how the results vary across regions or countries?
Oliver Rowntree:
As I've mentioned all ready, we see the widest gender gap both for mobile ownership and for mobile internet to be in South Asia. This has really been a consistent finding over time, but we do promisingly see that South Asia is really what's driving the reduction in the mobile internet gender gap as well. There's a real rapid growth in internet access, particularly in India, but in Pakistan and Bangladesh and that sort of rising level of awareness and ownership and use of internet is driving down the gender gap in that region. Whereas in other regions we're seeing more continuity and less change over time in the gender gaps. Sub-Saharan Africa where we see the second widest gap, we see that being pretty persistent at around 37% from mobile internet. So, South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa have by far the largest gender gaps overall. It's much smaller in Latin America, both for mobile ownership and mobile internet where over time we've seen that trend too pretty negligible overall, at least sort of from the countries that we observe on a consistent basis.
Oliver Rowntree:
And then within regions there can also be substantial variation. We can't say that regional trends are necessarily consistent across countries within regions. Taking, for example, Sub-Saharan Africa, even looking at basic mobile ownership, we don't see a very wide gap in Kenya, for example. There's only a 5% gender gap mobile ownership. Whereas in Mozambique, one of the least developed mobile markets where penetration is much lower than many other countries in the region, there's a 17% gender gap. Likewise, looking at Asia, we see a 10% gender gap in Indonesia, which is still considerable but much, much less than the 38% gender gap we see in Pakistan, which consistently has one of the widest overall.
Alice Merry:
And do you have any idea from the report what the countries are doing to get it right? In Latin America where you mentioned that the gap is very small or in Indonesia where it's relatively small for the region. I wonder if the report gives us any sense of how they've achieved that.
Oliver Rowntree:
It's not something that we delved too much into in this report specifically. This is more sort of intended to be our annual overview of what the state of affairs is in terms of the mobile gender gap. But it is something that we certainly track very, very closely and one of the activities that we do is we work closely with the mobile industry specifically to try and support them in addressing the gender gap and we invite mobile operators to make formal commitments to close the gender gap. So currently across low- and middle-income countries, 30 operators have made commitments to reduce the gender gap in their customer base. So, we see very different landscapes in different regions and we see those operators working to address those commitments in very different ways.
Oliver Rowntree:
I suppose what I would say is that the nature of those regions is already very different. We typically see a correlation between the GDP per capita of a country and the scale of its gender, whereby a wealthier country typically has a small agenda gap. And this is reflective of the fact that things like disparities in education and literacy levels play a really strong role in determining the scale of the gender gap. Of course, it's not a realistic expectation for us to advise that the way to close the mobile gender gap is to equalize education. Because of course that's a structural problem that is absolutely critical but not something that's going to be fixed overnight. But there are certainly things that operators in markets where there is a lot of structural factors underpinning the gender gap, actions that the stakeholders are taking to address that. Things like really driving the affordability of those devices and data for example.
Oliver Rowntree:
We've seen part of the reason why there's been this really rapid reduction of the gender gap in South Asia is that we've seen quite quick price decline for mobile services across the region. One really notable example that we found fascinating is the emergence of the Jio Phone, which is a device from a leading operator in India called Reliance Jio. This is what they call a smart-feature phone. The phone factor is a feature phone, but it has a lot of the functionality of a smartphone. So, you can access a 4G LTE network. You can watch YouTube videos on this, despite it looking like almost your basic Nokia 3310. The functionality really is remarkable, but this thing is priced at below $10. So, when you're weighing up the cost benefit in a lower income household that may be slightly disinclined to allow female family members to own a mobile phone. It's a lot easier to overcome those barriers when the cost barrier is much less prohibitive.
Oliver Rowntree:
But a lot of organizations are also thinking about, "How do we tackle that digital skills gap?" The underlying educational gaps aren't going to close overnight, but given those things, how can we empower citizens to be able to connect and not be left behind as digital becomes all the more important. A lot of organizations are working on this. I'm not sure that we've yet come up with the panacea to solve the problem of digital literacy, but there's a lot of interest in the topic.
Alice Merry:
It's really interesting to hear about this Jio Phone. I hadn't heard about that before and especially kind of coming back to what you've mentioned before about this user journey and about it's one thing to access a phone, another thing to use it, another thing to have access to these more advanced services that this hybrid phone is making available so much more cheaply. I wanted to bring us back to that and ask you at which point along that journey is most important? Where do you see the really transformational services being available? How much difference does it makes to someone's life just to have access? How much difference does it make? How important is usage? How important are these more, more advanced services?
Oliver Rowntree:
Yeah, that's a great question. And I don't meet a very simple answer to that because I think the more research we do on this topic, the more we want to be careful about, first off, trying to make sweeping generalizations across countries because there's a huge amount of variety both across and within countries, user journeys definitely don't look the same everywhere. While we try and present a simplistic framework within which to understand it, I think if you try and get to something that works everywhere, that becomes quite difficult.
Oliver Rowntree:
I think the other thing to be cautious about is being too prescriptive about what use cases is valuable to somebody. As I've already mentioned, even something like Facebook, we might think of it as a relatively sort of trivial use case. But to somebody who's feeling very isolated and a woman who's perhaps married and moved away from her family and is feeling quite socially isolated, then the connectivity and the connection to family members that Facebook provides could be really quite a transformative use case.
Oliver Rowntree:
Equally, something like WhatsApp can be used in a frivolous way to just message friends, but it can also be something that's hugely empowering to somebody who wants to be able to run a small business and wants to be able to stay in touch with their customers or be able to show images of their products. So I don't think that it's necessarily fair to say that any one single platform is the thing that drives a transformative impact. I think it's when it allows somebody to either do something that they couldn't do before that has a really profound impact on their lives or do something that's important to them, but do it much more easily, cheaply, or regularly. It's not necessarily possible to boil that down to for everybody, it's something that we're still trying to wrap our heads around ourselves, but I think that's kind of a rule of thumb that I would use.
Alice Merry:
And it's true, isn't it? That conductivity in itself is enormous value. Like you said, if you feel socially isolated, if you are trying to set up a business, if you're just trying to stay in touch with the family, I think we all appreciate that in our own lives. So, it's no surprise that that should be so important to people.
Oliver Rowntree:
Yeah, of course. And it should certainly be acknowledged that too much connectivity can be a bad thing as well. But I don't think that those of us who've been grossed in the internet for many years should forget the fact that having it versus not having it can really make a huge difference for somebody who's never had much connectivity before and might otherwise be feeling isolated or disconnected.
Alice Merry:
Definitely. As someone who lives very far from my own family, I can certainly appreciate that. I wanted to ask you about something that really stood out to me in the last report. It was a fairly small part of the report, but it talked about video calls and it mentioned that women were actually higher users of video calls than men. I think it was about three quarters of the markets where you'd done the research. I just thought that was so interesting and I wonder if that stayed the same in this report, but do you have any ideas why that might be?
Oliver Rowntree:
That is one that I find absolutely fascinating as well. I think, yeah, it's a hugely interesting one and we've actually done other pieces of research that have expanded a little bit on that. I think, in general, video has proven to be unsurprisingly a hugely, hugely popular use case when it comes to mobile internet. And it's in many ways a really, really accessible one. It's something that really doesn't require a great deal of literacy, unlike say typing messages to use video. To make a video call, you just need to be able to navigate your way to the video call button on the appropriate app, which can be learned quite easily.
Oliver Rowntree:
But we also did research in South Asia several years ago that found that video calling was a particularly popular use case that had triggered initial and early usage of mobile internet disproportionately for women. Because it was a use case that, as I say, was quite accessible for those with limited literacy and digital literacy. But it was also a use case that was very kind of socially acceptable. It was very, very appealing to people and it allowed them to do something completely new that they hadn't been able to do before and video call with family overseas. And this was something that we heard time and time again in qualitative interviews. But it also, unlike a lot of other mobile internet use cases was entirely socially acceptable. It was something that no one could really object to wanting to speak to family overseas or say speak to a husband who was working overseas temporarily. Nobody could object to that as a use case in the way that a lot of people might be sensitive around Facebook uses. This kind of has leached association with sort of inappropriate behaviour which doesn't exist for video calling.
Oliver Rowntree:
Yeah, it's proven to be a really persistent and popular use case as has video consumption overall, it's worth saying. YouTube becoming a really, really increasingly popular user case I suppose amongst both men and women. And yeah, one that has remained highly popular and remained a real driver of women's mobile internet use absolutely.
Alice Merry:
That's so interesting and I can't help thinking it's such a opportunity for financial services as well using mobile services. You could just think of health insurance using tele doctor services, video doctor services. You could think of banks or insurance companies onboarding clients through video calls. I haven't seen in my own experience many financial services companies using that. But it does seem to have such a ripe opportunity for them.
Oliver Rowntree:
Yeah, it's a great. I think, as smartphones proliferate, I think that the opportunities that video presents are something that will be really exciting to explore. I think it's a medium that is much, much more equalizing and accessible for a huge number of people.
Oliver Rowntree:
I think another reason why understanding and addressing this gender gap in access at basic use is really critical because it could really unlock some exciting new use cases and functions that we've not really started exploring yet.
Alice Merry:
Move broadly on the report and then you talk quite a lot about the commercial opportunity. Could you summarize a little bit for everyone listening, how do you see the commercial opportunity in closing the mobile gender gap?
Oliver Rowntree:
Yeah, absolutely. This is something that we really try and stress wherever we can, which is not to say that this gender gap shouldn't be addressed for the value that it delivers to women. But particularly when we're working with the private sector on this topic, it's so much easier to be able to catalyse and maintain action on a large scale if we can really quantify and state the scale of the commercial opportunity and why it makes both good business sense as well as sense for the communities and societies within which we work. So, within our report we modelled what the overall commercial opportunity for closing the gender gap in mobile ownership and mobile use was. And we determined that over a five-year time period, both of those gender gaps across lower middle-income countries represented around $140 billion in additional revenues.
Oliver Rowntree:
Now of course closing those gender gaps entirely over that time period is an ambitious goal, but it certainly gives an indication of the kind of scale that we're talking about. And it's no surprise really when we're talking about half of the addressable market here and in particular in countries that are a little bit more mature and where particularly amongst the male population saturation of mobile services is [inaudible 00:30:20].
Oliver Rowntree:
Women represent the majority of the remaining unconnected. They represent the majority of the remaining potential customers. So, I think when engaging with and working with, communicated to the private sector on this topic. I think being able to make that point is really strong and really valuable. And I suppose also the fact that this is a big economic opportunity as well. So, we looked at what the impact of closing the gender gap in mobile internet use would be specifically across that same time horizon and found that this could drive an additional $700 billion in economic growth across low and middle income countries. So, a real imperative from that sort of economic perspective for governments and other stakeholders as well.
Alice Merry:
Really exciting opportunities. GSMA has been measuring this gap I think for three years now and during that time you've seen some really significant change even just in three years. The drop in the mobile internet gap that you mentioned in the beginning, a smaller drop, but still a drop in the gap in mobile phone usage at all. How do you expect the landscape to evolve in the next year? What should people be looking out for?
Oliver Rowntree:
I think a couple of things that I've touched on all ready really. I think it's that awareness and understanding of the value of internet is growing at a really, really rapid pace. So, video content is proliferating extremely quickly. I think the growing availability of local language of video content and sort of locally relevant content over video, I think is a really exciting thing and will be driving the relevance of internet connectivity to really great degree in a lot more countries. I think there's still concerted action that needs to be taken there to make sure that everybody has relevant content in their own language. But I think YouTube is making a really big difference in that space as well as TikTok. So, I think growth in that and growth in the consumption of video content. I think there's a lot of interest and a lot of work on digital skills currently on understanding how they manifest currently as a barrier, how they should be understood within the framework of different use cases that people find valuable.
Oliver Rowntree:
Perhaps not just digital skills overall, but how do digital skills enable or prevent the usage of certain applications in use cases that really drive value for people. I think as we come to understand that better, we'll also come to a much better place in understanding how to address it and close those gaps in digital literacy that tend to, as we see it, disproportionately affect women and disproportionately access that prevent their access to digital and financial services.
Oliver Rowntree:
I've already mentioned the emergence of smart-feature phone hybrid type devices, which have been most successful so far in India, but I think will gain traction in a lot of other regions as well. And so, if these can help drive down the price of fast internet connectivity, I think we could really potentially see quite an explosion in access, which could be really, really exciting. I'd say those are the top ones that I'm watching out for over the next year.
Alice Merry:
Brilliant. Thank you, Oliver. That's absolutely fascinating. And if people want to read more, they can go onto the GSMA website, they can read the full report. We'll leave a link to it in the show notes. It is, like I said, a real treasure tribe. I'm sure there is tons more data and information that people can take from that report. Thank you very much, Oliver. It's been really interesting to hear directly from you about the findings. Thank you.
Oliver Rowntree:
Really my pleasure. Thanks, Alice.
Alice Merry:
Thanks a lot.
Alice Merry:
What an interesting set of results. There seems to be a real positive to take away from the Mobile Gender Gap Report, which is this really impressive reduction in the gap between men's and women's access to mobile internet. That's gone down, Oliver told us, by seven percentage points in just three years in the time that they've been measuring it. And at the same time there's this negative that the underlying gender gap in mobile ownership isn't really moving. So, there seems to be a group of remaining unconnected people who are overwhelmingly rural, overwhelmingly less educated, overwhelmingly women that are still without access to basic mobile services.
Alice Merry:
I think there's so much from Oliver's interview that's really relevant for those of us working in finance. I mean this real sense that mobile internet is changing rapidly and could potentially really explode in coming years, especially with the availability of these hybrid smart-feature phones that Oliver mentioned for less than $10. I mean, the potential for mobile financial services through those kinds of devices is huge. And also, really this point about video calls. They are so attractive, so socially acceptable, so available to women in so many countries, and how can we as the financial sector take advantage of that?
Alice Merry:
I'd love to hear if anyone listening has works in any interesting ways with video calls or has come across any really interesting projects, especially in finance using video calls. I'd be really interested to hear, so please do get in touch. I'll leave my email in the show notes. I hope you found the interview as interesting and as useful as I did and a big thanks to Oliver for sharing those insights with us. Go and take a look at the report. I'll pop the link in the show notes. It's out today on the GSMA website. Finally, you know the drill. Please do subscribe to the podcast on Apple iTunes on Spotify, wherever you get your podcast, share it with a friend. Leave us a review. It all really does help. Thanks a lot. See you next time.