An Exploratory Study on Women's Struggles with Mobile Technology and Payment Applications: The Digital Gender Gap in Rural Delhi-NCR

Abstract

The mobile payment platforms have become established throughout India, generating new opportunity points to access financial inclusion; however, the resulting benefits are not equally distributed in terms of gender and space. The current research targets the digital gender divide occurring to women living in rural areas of the Delhi-NCR area, specifically their acceptance as well as their adoption and use of mobile payment applications. The questionnaire that was structured was issued to a group of 400 rural women, therefore, allowing the investigation of the effect of demographic factors, levels of digital literacy, and perceived barriers on the adoption and frequency of use of mobile payment services. Statistical tests were done using one-way ANOVA and multiple linear regression and the SPSS software package. Empirical evidence shows that there is a strong discriminative effect of income and educational attainment on the levels of adoption (ηη² = .417 and .398, respectively); no statistically significant effect of age is detected. Digital literacy contributes 71.9% and 63.3% to the variance in adoption and usage frequency, respectively (R² = .719 and R 2 =.633). The perceived barriers, with the biggest contribution of security issues and lack of connectivity, describe 64.0 percent of the variation in usage frequency (R 2 =.640). The analysis supports all of the four hypotheses. The research contributes to existing literature on the topic of UTAUT2 and digital literacy in the Indian rural financial environment and suggests specific interventions to be implemented to train, develop infrastructure, and draft policies.