Scientific Presentations
LabTalks@DCD
Department of Digital and Computational Demography
Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research (MPIDR), Rostock, Germany, May 07, 2025
11:00 AM: Talk with Casey Breen - Digital Gender Gaps Project: Measuring the Digital Divide and Explaining its Demographic Consequences
Room 400 and Zoom
Abstract
The digital revolution has ushered in many societal and economic benefits. Yet access to technologies such as mobile phones and the internet remains highly unequal, especially by gender in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). In this talk, I first present new efforts to generate reliable, quantitative estimates of digital gender inequalities at the subnational level. While national-level estimates are increasingly available, subnational estimates are essential for monitoring gaps within countries and implementing targeted interventions under the global sustainable development goals. We develop subnational estimates of mobile and internet adoption by gender across 2,075 regions in 117 LMICs from 2015 to 2025, applying machine-learning algorithms to Facebook user data, geospatial covariates, development indicators, and population composition data. I then turn to the demographic consequences of digital expansion. Drawing on diffusion theories of fertility transition, we examine how the spread of internet and mobile technologies shapes fertility behavior. Linking individual-level birth histories from the Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) in Nigeria to annual maps of mobile phone coverage, I estimate the causal effect of 3G expansion on fertility. Exploiting plausibly exogenous variation in 3G rollout across time and space, I find that 3G access reduced the annual probability of a woman giving birth by 9% against baseline. Together, these studies provide new measurements of the digital divide and evidence on consequences of digitalization for demographic change.
About
Casey Breen is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Oxford and an incoming Assistant Professor in Demography/Sociology at UT-Austin. He completed his Ph.D. in Demography and M.A. in Biostatistics at UC Berkeley. His research develops and applies computational and demographic methods to answer questions in population health and inequality. In one line of research, he investigates mortality disparities and dynamics in the United States using large-scale administrative data. A second line of research applies network-based methods and machine learning to estimate key demographic quantities in data-sparse contexts. His work has been published or is forthcoming in Demography, American Journal of Epidemiology, Population and Development Review, Demographic Research, and Population Research and Policy Review, among other outlets.
Register to Take Part
You would like to attend the Online Seminar Talk? You are very welcome. Please register by writing an e-mail to office-zagheni@demogr.mpg.de.
Online Seminar Talk, May, 7th from 11:00 a.m. to 12 p.m. (Rostock time)