Digital skills training programs have become a cornerstone of European social investment strategies, yet participation rates among the most vulnerable groups remain persistently low. This paper investigates why unemployed women fail to participate in public digital training programs even when faced with a meaningful financial incentive. Drawing on a randomized encouragement design implemented in partnership with the Catalan Public Employment Service (SOC), we exploit exogenous variation in participation incentives — with a strong first stage — to document that take-up remains low even after removing financial barriers. This suggests that the obstacles to participation are structural rather than economic.

To understand what drives this pattern, we complement the experimental evidence with in-depth qualitative interviews with non-participants, examining the practical, symbolic, and institutional barriers that prevent engagement — including caregiving burdens, technostress, and mismatches between program design and participants' lived circumstances.

Together, the evidence speaks to a fundamental tension in gendered activation policy: programs designed for digitally vulnerable women may systematically fail to reach those who need them most. The paper contributes to debates on the gender dimensions of social investment and the structural limits of activation policies under conditions of deep inequality. Preliminary results from both the experimental and qualitative components will be presented at the conference.