The sheer volume of data posted on social media has made it possible to derive a number of fascinating insights into how people behave.  Researchers from the Universidad Carlos III de Madrid have developed a tool that uses Facebook data to understand the gender divide in society across a wide range of social and economic indicators.

The tool is documented in a recently published paper, produces a metric that the researchers call The Facebook Gender Divide, which is itself based upon 1.5 billion users on the platform.  The team believe that the metric compares favorably with standard social and economic measures of gender inequality used by the likes of the World Economic Forum.

Facebook insights

For instance, the researchers found that the more women are active on Facebook in a country, the faster women are approaching gender equality in economic terms in those countries.

“We interpret that as an indication that equality in Facebook access might help to close the economic gender gap,” the authors explain. “Women seem to benefit more from using Facebook than men”.

As with other studies involving social network data, the researchers believe Facebook data has tremendous potential due to the cheap, fast and effective analyses that can be performed on huge population sizes.  They believe this can give them rapid insights into a wide range of societal factors, including unemployment, health and gender equality.

“Our study shows how the socio-demographic information available on social networks can be of great value, since it can be used to generate metrics at the global level (such as the Facebook Gender Divide), based on a methodology which is extraordinarily cheap and common to all the countries analysed,” the authors explain.