From shopping to businesses, survey sees five-fold jump in Indian women using smartphones

In the last 10 years, women users leapt from 40 million to 200 million households; survey says change in next decade will be faster.

Representational image | Dhiraj Singh/Bloomberg

New Delhi: More and more women are finding it easy to adopt technology in their lives, a survey has found. The survey by LocalCircles — which studied the habits of Indian women applying technology tools — reported a five-fold increase in households with women using smartphones. A significant jump in the last 10 years.

The survey found that women relied on smartphones to keep in touch with friends and family, to shop online and to make transactions. They also used smartphones to find information, create content and run their own businesses. The survey noted that despite prevailing gender discrimination, technology and connectivity played an important role in making things better for women. Technology afforded women access to education and employment opportunities, the study found.

“It is this adoption of technology along with avenues to educate, express, create, and transact that give us hope that the change in the next decade will be even faster than the previous one,” the survey said.

The LocalCircles survey covered 20,000 household respondents located in 324 districts across India. Sixty-eight per cent of households responded in the affirmative when asked whether women members had started using smartphones/gadgets in the last 10 years, while 30% said ‘no’. Only 2% did not have any opinion.

The survey saw a jump from 40 million to 200 million in the number of households where women used smartphones/gadgets in the last 10 years.

Fifty-three per cent women used smartphones for shopping, 38% said they booked various tickets or services, 47% made payments, 71% found information on the internet, 79% stayed in touch with family and friends, 24% created content, 9% ran a business and 18% used it for their work.

The survey further added this massive rise was facilitated by the “availability of low-cost smartphones and mobile data connection in India” in recent years.

The ‘Mobile Gender Gap Report 2019’, that was published three years ago, had also said there was a 26% rise in the affordability of mobile internet in India between 2014 and 2017 — the largest increase in any country in this period — which might have contributed to the reduction in the “mobile internet gender gap” in India.

The report argued that digital inclusion of women was important to help “empower them, make them more connected, safe and able to access information and services”.