Gender gap is a classical theoretical issue in labor economics. Achieving gender equity of opportunity is an important symbol of national governance modernization, as well as an intrinsic requirement for high-quality economic development. The rapid rise of the digital economy in China has brought opportunities to improve the employment quality and realize gender equity.

From the perspective of employment quality of rural migrant workers, this paper explores the narrowing effect of digital economy development on the gender gap and its mechanism. First, through theoretical analysis, it is concluded that the digital economy can narrow the gender gap in employment quality by alleviating motherhood penalty, mitigating gender differences in labor productivity, and reducing gender discrimination. Then, employing CMDS from 2012 to 2018 and macro-economic data at the prefecture-level city level, this paper constructs a “city-year” fixed effects model for empirical research and finds that there is a significant gender gap in employment quality among rural migrant workers. The development of the digital economy helps improve the overall employment quality of rural migrant workers, and its effect on women is significantly stronger than on men, thus effectively narrowing the gender gap. The three key mechanisms derived from theoretical analysis are also verified by empirical research. Heterogeneity analysis shows that the above effect is more significant for regions with more developed marketization and new-generation rural migrant workers with a higher education level, which reflects an imbalanced distribution of digital dividends.

The possible innovation lies in that: Existing literature mainly discusses the impact mechanism of the digital economy on the gender gap under the isolated mechanisms such as flexible employment, occupational segregation, and information matching. Starting from the classical theory of gender gap formation in labor economics, this paper condenses the potential paths into three levels and conducts rigorous empirical tests, thus providing new and pivotal theoretical frameworks and empirical evidence for this field.