Although women’s participation in tertiary education and the labour force has expanded over the past decades, women continue to be underrepresented in technical and managerial occupations. We analyse if gender inequalities also manifest themselves in online populations of professionals by leveraging audience estimates from LinkedIn’s advertisement platform to explore gender gaps among LinkedIn users across countries, ages, industries and seniorities. We further validate LinkedIn gender gaps against ground truth professional gender gap indicators derived from the International Labour Organization’s (ILO) Statistical Database, and examine the feasibility and biases of predicting global professional gender gap indicators using gender gaps computed from LinkedIn’s online population. We find that women are significantly underrepresented relative to men on LinkedIn in countries in Africa, the Middle East and South Asia, among older individuals, in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) fields and higher-level managerial positions. Furthermore, a simple, aggregate indicator of the female-to-male ratio of LinkedIn users, which we term the LinkedIn Gender Gap Index (GGI), shows strong positive correlations with ILO ground truth professional gender gaps. A parsimonious regression model using the LinkedIn GGI to predict ILO professional gender gaps enables us to expand country coverage of different ILO indicators, albeit with better performance for general professional gender gaps than managerial gender gaps. Nevertheless, predictions generated using the LinkedIn population show some distinctive biases. Notably, we find that in countries where there is greater gender inequality in internet access, LinkedIn data predict greater gender equality than the ground truth, indicating an overrepresentation of high status women online in these settings. Our work contributes to a growing literature seeking to harness the ‘data revolution’ for global sustainable development by evaluating the potential of a novel data source for filling gender data gaps and monitoring key indicators linked to women’s economic empowerment.

In high-income countries, women increasingly remain permanently childless. Little is known about the relationship between childlessness and socioeconomic development in non-Western societies and particularly sub-Saharan Africa. At lower levels of development, poverty-driven (i.e., involuntary) childlessness may decrease with increases in levels of development, while at higher levels of development opportunity-driven (i.e., voluntary and circumstantial) childlessness may rise with development. Thus, we expect a U-shaped relationship between childlessness and development overall. We examine this idea for sub-Saharan Africa. We further contribute by differentiating between female and male childlessness; and between involuntary, voluntary and circumstantial childlessness. Moreover, we construct new indicators of subnational historical development to assess both inter- and intra-country variation, and distinguish between three components (health, education and income) to investigate the drivers behind the hypothesized U-shaped relationship. Using 291 Demographic and Health Surveys between 1986 and 2018 from 38 countries and 384 regions, we find a U-shaped relationship between female childlessness and development, and a linear relationship for men. The U-shape for women results from negative associations of female involuntary childlessness with health and educational advancements, combined with positive correlations of voluntary and circumstantial childlessness with education and income improvements. While these positive associations are stronger among men than women, the negative relationships of involuntary childlessness with health and education observed for women are absent for men, resulting in an overall positive and linear relationship between development and childlessness among men. Our findings have implications for how we might expect childlessness rates to evolve with future levels of development.

Childlessness and socio-economic well-being interact dynamically throughout the life course, possibly resulting in an accumulation of socio-economic (dis)advantage. Methods commonly used to investigate this hypothesis are unable to simultaneously acknowledge that childlessness entails a heterogeneous and processual 'non-event' which interrelates with multiple life domains. I use Bayesian multivariate hierarchical growth curve modelling to facilitate synchronous incorporation of these substantive complexities. I construct prospective interdependent life course trajectories of socio-economic well-being for eventual parents and permanently childless adults; distinguishing voluntary, involuntary, circumstantial and indecisive childlessness. Using 1970 British Cohort Study data, I find that parents and voluntarily childless adults are more satisfied with life than non-voluntarily childless adults. Voluntarily and circumstantially childless women earn most and mothers least, while fathers outearn childless men. (Dis)advantage in economic and male subjective well-being accumulates throughout the life course. Group differences in partnerships, employ-This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.