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<p>Despite expanding digital infrastructure, women in India’s informal economy face a persistent mobile gender gap shaped by structural barriers and limited proficiency beyond basic device access. This study employs a mixed-methods design, combining qualitative interviews with a structured survey of 604 workers across domestic work, street vending, and tailoring to examine how informal women workers use digital devices, platforms, and services for livelihood purposes. The analysis documents self-identified smartphone uses, help-seeking patterns, and introduces a domain-specific Digital Confidence Index (DCI) to characterise women’s digital engagement across messaging, social media, search, and finance. Findings highlight a marked “language penalty” for non-English readers across all domains except social media, and show that help-seeking is, in most cases, a positive predictor of digital confidence rather than a simple marker of deficit. Additional patterns vary by domain and occupation, with age, education, personal smartphone ownership, and financial decision-making exhibiting distinct associations with confidence in different functional areas. Taken together, the results support an understanding of digital confidence as a relational proficiency shaped by individual resources (language, education, device control) and mediated support through family and institutions. Programmes aimed at closing the digital gender gap therefore need to move beyond device provision to include language and literacy support, financial autonomy, and worker-oriented institutional mediators that can scaffold women’s engagement with digital finance and welfare systems. Policies on the digitalisation of basic services must ensure that older and less formally educated populations are not further severed from access.</p>

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Women in informal economy work in Urban India: understanding and characterizing women’s digital use, digital confidence and help-seeking

  • 期刊论文

  • 发表日期：

    2026年7月30日

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  • Antara Rai Chowdhury,
  • Neha Maria Verghese,
  • Aditi Surie

摘要

Despite expanding digital infrastructure, women in India’s informal economy face a persistent mobile gender gap shaped by structural barriers and limited proficiency beyond basic device access. This study employs a mixed-methods design, combining qualitative interviews with a structured survey of 604 workers across domestic work, street vending, and tailoring to examine how informal women workers use digital devices, platforms, and services for livelihood purposes. The analysis documents self-identified smartphone uses, help-seeking patterns, and introduces a domain-specific Digital Confidence Index (DCI) to characterise women’s digital engagement across messaging, social media, search, and finance. Findings highlight a marked “language penalty” for non-English readers across all domains except social media, and show that help-seeking is, in most cases, a positive predictor of digital confidence rather than a simple marker of deficit. Additional patterns vary by domain and occupation, with age, education, personal smartphone ownership, and financial decision-making exhibiting distinct associations with confidence in different functional areas. Taken together, the results support an understanding of digital confidence as a relational proficiency shaped by individual resources (language, education, device control) and mediated support through family and institutions. Programmes aimed at closing the digital gender gap therefore need to move beyond device provision to include language and literacy support, financial autonomy, and worker-oriented institutional mediators that can scaffold women’s engagement with digital finance and welfare systems. Policies on the digitalisation of basic services must ensure that older and less formally educated populations are not further severed from access.