Extended Data Figure 7: Female activity is reduced disproportionately in countries with high activity inequality.

a, Distribution of daily steps for females, males, and all users in representative countries of increasing activity inequality (Japan, the UK, the USA and Saudi Arabia). While in countries with low activity inequality females and males have very similar levels of activity (for example, Japan), the distributions of female and male activity differ greatly for countries with high activity inequality (for example, Saudi Arabia and the USA). Activity distributions in these countries demonstrate that larger variances in activity (Fig. 1c) are due to a disproportionate reduction in the activity of females and not just an increase in variance overall. b, Activity inequality increases with the relative activity gender gap on a country level (linear fit; Methods). We find that the relative gender gap ranges between 0.041 (Sweden) and 0.380 (Qatar). The average of daily steps for females is lower than for males in all 46 countries. The gender gap explains 43% of the observed variance in activity inequality (linear fit; R² = 0.43). This suggests that activity inequality could be greatly reduced through increases in female activity alone.