Measuring Women’s Digital Inclusion. A poset-based approach to the Women in Digital Scoreboard

Women’s participation in digital society is integral to achieving Agenda 2030 and an essential component in the EU strategy for digital transition. This article applies a poset-based approach to the European Women in Digital (WiD) Scoreboard, to examine women’s digital inclusion in European countries. The poset methodology allows us to identify the most significant indicators for each of the dimensions that compose the WiD, considering the whole EU-28 as well as different clusters of countries, and to construct a new ranking that avoids the shortcomings of the aggregative approaches and the pre-treatment of data. Our results show that two indicators, STEM graduates and the unadjusted pay gap, are the most relevant ones in attaining women’s digital inclusion. Our research contributes to better understand the dynamics and the underlying causes of women’s digital inclusion in the EU-28 countries, providing a clustering of EU countries into four performance groups depending on their women’s digital inclusion and contributes to the design of more targeted and effective policies for integrating gender equality in the EU digital transition strategy.