Globally, 77 per cent of men use the Internet, compared with 71 per cent of women. Although the number of female and male Internet users has increased by nearly 45 per cent since 2019, about 280 million more men than women use the Internet worldwide in 2025.
Gender parity is deemed to be achieved when the gender parity score, defined as the female percentage divided by the male percentage, is between 0.98 and 1.02. As is the case for overall Internet use, gender parity is closely correlated with the level of development.
The global gender parity score of 0.92 in 2025 is the same as in 2019, indicating that in recent years, there has been no progress towards global gender parity.
Among ITU regions, gender parity has been achieved in Europe, and in the Americas and the CIS regions. There has been no progress in the Asia-Pacific region where the regional gender parity score declined slightly from 0.92 in 2019 to 0.91 in 2025. The Arab States region displays a similar trend, with the gender parity score remaining the same at 0.86 over the same period. Africa still lags behind other regions but has witnessed notable improvement over the past six years with its gender parity score increasing from 0.70 to 0.78.
There was a small improvement in the gender parity score in LDCs and LLDCs, although men are still significantly more likely to use the Internet than women. In the SIDS group, the gender parity score remained at or even above 1 between 2019 and 2025, indicating gender parity. The SIDS are also a notable, positive exception to the strong correlation between gender parity and overall Internet use as they have achieved gender parity even though less than two-thirds of the population use the Internet.