Measuring the digital inclusion of women: a poset-based approach to the women in digital scoreboard

Abstract

The participation of women in digital society is essential to achieving the objectives of Agenda 2030 and an essential component in the EU strategy for the digital transition. This article applies a poset-based approach to the European Women in Digital (WiD) Scoreboard, to examine the digital inclusion of women in EU Member States and in the UK. The poset methodology enables us to identify the most significant indicators for each of the dimensions of the Scoreboard, considering the EU-28 as well as different clusters of countries, and to construct a new ranking that deals with the shortcomings of the aggregative approaches, the pre-treatment of data and the full compensability effect generated by arithmetic means. Our results show that two indicators, STEM graduates and the unadjusted pay gap, are the most significant for achieving the digital inclusion of women. Our research contributes to better understanding the dynamics and the factors facilitating the digital inclusion of women in the EU-28 Member States, providing a clustering of EU countries into four performance groups depending on the digital inclusion of women. It also contributes to the design of more targeted and effective policies for integrating gender equality into the EU digital transition strategy.