Gender Gaps in Education, Not Digital Access, Shape the Path to Clean Energy

When policymakers talk about accelerating the transition to renewable energy, the conversation usually revolves around technology: cheaper solar panels, bigger batteries, smarter grids. A new study argues that this framing misses something fundamental. The deepest levers of the energy transition may not be technological at all, but demographic and educational — and in particular, the gap between men and women in access to schooling. The research, published in the journal Discover Sustainability by Rahim Kallal of Carthage University and Emna Essadik of the University of Tunis El Manar, offers one of the broadest statistical portraits yet of how gender inequality, digital development, population dynamics and renewable energy consumption interact across the world economy.

The study’s scope is ambitious. The authors assembled data for 128 countries, spanning every World Bank income group from high-income economies such as Germany and Japan to low-income nations including Burundi, Chad and Madagascar. The observation window runs from 2006 to 2021, sixteen years that encompass the global financial crisis, the collapse in solar and wind costs, and the digital explosion of the smartphone era. Rather than examining each country in isolation, the researchers treated the entire panel as a single dynamic system, asking how shocks to one variable ripple through the others over time.

The methodological engine behind the analysis is a panel vector autoregression, or PVAR, model. In a PVAR framework, every variable is regressed on its own past values and on the past values of all the other variables in the system, with country-specific effects and time trends controlled for. This design has a crucial advantage: it does not impose a one-way causal direction in advance. Instead, it lets the data reveal whether, for example, changes in educational gender inequality precede changes in renewable energy consumption, or whether the arrow points the other way, or in both directions at once. The authors then applied Granger-causality tests, which assess whether past values of one variable contain statistically significant information for predicting another, and impulse response analysis, which traces how the system reacts to a sudden shock in a single variable.

The variables themselves were chosen to capture distinct dimensions of sustainable development. Gender inequality was proxied by educational attainment, reflecting the gap in schooling between women and men. Digital development was captured through a composite Information and Communication Technology indicator combining three widely used measures: the share of individuals using the internet, mobile phone subscriptions per 100 people, and fixed telephone subscriptions per 100 people. Renewable energy consumption served as a proxy for one dimension of climate change mitigation, while population growth, urbanization and economic output completed the system. The Sustainable Development Goals, the authors note, form an interconnected web, and any serious analysis must respect that interdependence rather than studying each goal in a silo.

The headline finding is striking precisely because it is not about renewable energy at all. The analysis uncovered a statistically significant bidirectional relationship between gender inequality in education and population growth. In other words, countries where girls and women face greater educational disadvantage tend to experience faster population growth, and faster population growth in turn reinforces educational gender gaps. This two-way feedback loop is exactly the kind of self-perpetuating dynamic that development economists have long theorized: when women have fewer years of schooling, fertility tends to be higher, and larger families with strained resources make it harder to invest equally in every child’s education, with daughters often the first to lose out.

Even more consequential for policy is what emerged when the authors examined the joint dynamics of the whole system. Population growth was the only variable with a statistically significant joint effect on the system’s overall dynamics. That means demographic momentum — the sheer arithmetic of how many people are born, how fast families grow, and how populations expand — dominates the evolution of this interconnected system more than any other single factor. Yet the pairwise associations between population growth and renewable energy consumption, and between population growth and the ICT indicator, did not reach significance at conventional statistical thresholds. The demographic signal is powerful, but it operates through the system’s structure rather than through simple one-to-one correlations with energy choices.

Here the study delivers its most uncomfortable result for advocates of technological optimism. Educational attainment and the composite ICT indicator showed no significant direct causal effect on renewable energy consumption. Closing the gender gap in schooling, in this framework, does not mechanically translate into higher renewable energy uptake, and neither does the spread of internet access and mobile phones. The authors are careful about interpretation: the absence of a detected direct pathway does not prove that gender equality in education has no influence on the energy transition. It means that any such influence, if present, is not captured as a direct causal channel in this particular model. The effect may be indirect, mediated through demographic change, or it may operate on longer timescales than the sixteen-year window can resolve.

Urbanization added another layer of nuance. In the PVAR estimates, urbanization behaved as weakly exogenous, meaning it evolved largely according to its own momentum and showed no significant causal links to any of the other variables in the system. Cities, in this dataset, are neither a driver nor a victim of the gender-education-demography-energy nexus; they march to their own drummer. This finding challenges a common assumption in sustainability discourse that urbanization is a central transmission channel through which development variables interact with energy systems.

What, then, should policymakers take away? The authors draw a clear conclusion: gender-equitable education and demographic policy should be treated as a primary lever for climate-related outcomes, with digitalization and renewable energy investment serving as complementary, indirectly reinforcing instruments rather than independent drivers of change. This is a reordering of priorities. In the conventional hierarchy, renewable energy subsidies and digital infrastructure programs sit at the top, while education and family planning are treated as worthy but separate development goals. The PVAR evidence suggests the hierarchy is inverted: the demographic feedback loop between girls’ education and population growth is the strongest, most statistically robust connection in the system, and it shapes the terrain on which energy and technology policies operate.

The study also carries a methodological lesson for the field. Much of the literature on the drivers of renewable energy adoption relies on single-country time series or on cross-sectional correlations, both of which struggle to separate cause from effect. By pooling 128 countries across 16 years and allowing every variable to respond to every other, the PVAR design provides a more honest picture of a system in which everything influences everything else with lags. The sample’s breadth — from Iceland to Ethiopia, from Singapore to Chad — means the results are not an artifact of any one region or income level. The authors report no funding and no competing interests, and the article is open access under a Creative Commons Attribution license, published on 14 October 2026 after acceptance on 25 September 2026.

There are, of course, limits to what any macro-level panel can establish. A composite ICT index cannot capture how digital tools are actually used, or whether they empower women or simply add another layer of inequality. Educational attainment is a blunt proxy for gender equality more broadly, which spans labor force participation, political representation and household bargaining power. And renewable energy consumption as a share of the energy mix is only one dimension of climate mitigation. But the study’s central message survives these caveats, and it is a message with genuine viral potential in an era of climate anxiety: the fastest route to a sustainable energy future may run through classrooms, and especially through the classrooms that girls are still denied. Fix that feedback loop, the data suggest, and the demographic pressure that shapes every other sustainability outcome begins to ease — while solar panels and smartphones, valuable as they are, work best as amplifiers of that change rather than substitutes for it.

Subject of Research: The dynamic relationships among gender inequality in education, ICT development, population growth and renewable energy consumption across 128 countries

Article Title: Dynamic interactions between gender inequality ICT development and renewable energy

Article References: Kallal, R., & Essadik, E. (2026). Dynamic interactions between gender inequality ICT development and renewable energy. Discover Sustainability. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43621-026-04905-z

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43621-026-04905-z

Keywords: renewable energy, gender inequality, education, ICT development, population growth, PVAR model, Granger causality, sustainable development, urbanization, demographics, climate mitigation, panel data