Observing gender dynamics and disparities with mobile phone metadata

We explore the extent to which gender disparities in Pakistan are reflected in the anonymized mobile phone logs of millions of Pakistani residents. Our analysis uses data capturing the communications behavior of several million individuals, for whom we observe the gender, but no additional demographic or personally identifying information. Here, we focus on validating aggregate regional patterns, correlating metrics derived from the mobile phone logs with socioeconomic statistics collected from more traditional sources. In these preliminary results, we observe a statistically significant relationship between districts with relatively high rates of female mobile phone penetration and districts that report high levels of gender parity in traditional surveys. However, this relationship is not uniform, and less developed regions exhibit a weaker correlation. We interpret these findings as suggestive evidence that such data can provide a novel perspective on gender dynamics in developing countries.