Machine Learning Predictive Analytics for Social Media Enabled Women's Economic Empowerment in Pakistan

TL;DR

This study explores how social media use influences women's entrepreneurship and economic empowerment in Pakistan, using mixed methods and machine learning to analyze engagement patterns and predict entrepreneurial activity.

Contribution

It introduces a novel combination of unsupervised and supervised machine learning techniques to analyze social media engagement and predict women's entrepreneurship in Pakistan.

Findings

39.4% believe social media positively impacts the economy

Only 14% participate in entrepreneurship activities

YouTube and WhatsApp are the most used platforms

Abstract

Our study investigates the interplay between young women's empowerment and Pakistan's economic growth, focusing on how social media use enhances their businesses and drives economic advancement. We utilize a mixed-methods research design, integrating both online and offline random sampling, for our survey of 51 respondents. We also utilized existing datasets consisting of both social media usage (n = 1000) and entrepreneurship (n = 1092). Our analysis identifies distinct social media engagement patterns via unsupervised learning and applies supervised models for entrepreneurship prediction, with logistic regression outperforming all other algorithms in terms of predictive accuracy and stability. In social media use, the cluster analysis reveals that at K=2, users form tightly packed, well-separated engagement groups. The results indicate that 39.4 percent of respondents believe social media positively impacts the economy by enabling businesses to generate increased revenue. However, only 14 percent of respondents participate in entrepreneurship, highlighting a substantial gap between digital engagement and business adoption. The analysis indicates that daily social media consumption is widespread with YouTube (66.7 percent) and WhatsApp (62.7 percent) being the most frequently used platforms. Key barriers identified are online harassment, limited digital literacy, and cultural constraints in a patriarchal society such as Pakistan. Additionally, 52.9 percent of respondents are unaware of government initiatives supporting women entrepreneurs, indicating limited policy outreach.