Topological structures in women’s digital and financial empowerment: A TDA

Many women in Malawi continue to face limited access to finance, digital tools, and formal labour mar-kets, despite policy efforts and donor support. Conventional gender metrics and monitoring frameworksfrequently overlook the intricate, multidimensional, and non-linear dynamics of women’s empowerment,resulting in a fragmented understanding of both progress and enduring inequalities. Motivated by thisgap, we apply topological data analysis (TDA) to gender-disaggregated national data from 2011 to 2024,including indicators such as account ownership, Internet use, primary education, salaried wage employ-ment, and political representation. Through the application of the Mapper algorithm, we uncover differentgroups of empowerment, recurring structural patterns, and isolated regions within the data that illumi-nate shifts over time, embedded inequities, and areas of stagnation in Malawi’s empowerment path.Our analysis reveals that improvements in education or digital connectivity are not reliably associatedwith enhanced financial autonomy or integration into the labor market, underscoring the asynchronousand nonlinear progression of empowerment. Furthermore, statistical tests confirm that key indicatorssuch as primary education, parliamentary representation, account ownership, and female unemploy-ment differ significantly across the identified regimes, providing quantitative support for the topologicalpatterns. We contend that structurally grounded topology-based approaches offer a valuable comple-ment to traditional aggregate indicators, allowing policymakers to formulate more nuanced and targetedstrategies that simultaneously leverage emerging opportunities and confront persistent systemic barriersto women’s empowerment.