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Gender equality in access to the internet and mobile phones has become increasingly recognised as a development goal. Monitoring progress towards this goal however is challenging due to the limited availability of gender-disaggregated data, particularly in low-income countries. In this data sparse context, we examine the potential of a source of digital trace ‘big data’ – Facebook’s advertisement audience estimates – that provides aggregate data on Facebook users by demographic characteristics covering the platform’s over 2 billion users to measure and ‘nowcast’ digital gender gaps. We generate a unique country-level dataset combining ‘online’ indicators of Facebook users by gender, age and device type, ‘offline’ indicators related to a country’s overall development and gender gaps, and official data on gender gaps in internet and mobile access where available. Using this dataset, we predict internet and …