"If we post, what will people think of us?": Offline Norms, Online Engagement and Unpacking Gendered Experiences in a Pakistani Facebook Tech Community

This paper investigates how deeply entrenched offline gender norms and patriarchal power structures constrain and shape participation within Tech Aids, a large Facebook community in Pakistan focused on peer-to-peer technical help and e-commerce transactions. Through a qualitative study involving 14 months of participant observation and 20 semi-structured interviews (11 male, 9 female), we document significant gendered disparities: women exhibit lower public engagement, driven primarily by heightened privacy concerns, fear of harassment, and perceived male gatekeeping. Our analysis reveals that traditional socio-cultural restrictions on women’s mobility and constrained interactions with unfamiliar men in physical tech marketplaces are directly mirrored in the online Tech Aids environment. To manage these risks, women actively engage in practices of digital purdah, using workarounds like proxy-posting through male relatives to maintain both technical access and cultural modesty. By linking these offline barriers to online participation strategies, this study provides a vulnerability-centric framework and actionable design insights for creating more equitable online tech communities that explicitly address complex, deeply rooted socio-cultural constraints in non-WEIRD contexts.