The Alliance for Affordable Internet (A4AI) and Web Foundation were selected for a research grant from the Internet Society Foundation. Together they will conduct a research that provides evidence of the macroscale impacts -economic and societal -that come from the legacy of decades of broadband policymaking that has ignored the digital gender gap and left women and girls behind. The research project will hinge on interviews across low- and middle-income countries and mobile phone surveys from two regions sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia with special focus on Nigeria and India. It will further develop an economic model to estimate the cost of excluding women from the digital economy. At the end, a flagship report will be published in 2021, followed by two regional spotlight reports, focused on West Africa and South Asia. A4AI and the Women's Rights Online initiative are planning to capitalise on the research findings to advocate for policy reform.