Project details

Project title

Gender and digital usage inequality among adolescents: A comparative study of 39 countries.

Country or countries

AUS, OST, BEL, BUL, CAN, CHI, COL, CRO, CZE, DEN, FIN, GER, GRE, HUN, ICE, IRL, ITA, JPN, JDN, KOR, LAT, LTA, Macao, NED, NZA, NOR, POL, PT, QTA, RUS, SER, SVN, SVK, SPA, SWE, SWI, THA, TUR, URU.

Language(s) of report

English

Funder of research

Other but not specified

Date of fieldwork

2006

Main research focus

Target group studied

Children

Methodology

Description of studied group

Age of children studied

15; 16; 17;

Methodology

Quantitative

Size of sample

248,000+

If survey, scope of sample

International

Topics covered

 

Access and use; Opportunities and benefits

Findings

 

Boys report using computers at home more often than girls in all the countries under study, except for Colombia, Ireland, the Netherlands, Qatar and Thailand. They also report using computers at places other than home or school more often than girls in all countries under investigation, except for Colombia, Latvia and Uruguay. The hypothesis that girls use communication technologies more than boys for educational purposes is rejected. In addition, boys report using ICT for entertainment more often than girls. Finally, the analysis suggests that more gender-neutral societies are associated with increasing the negative (for girls) gap in computer use at home and in entertainment use of computers and the internet. It also suggests that more gender-neutral societies are associated with reducing the negative (for girls) gap in computer use at places other than home or school and in the frequency of computer use for communication. The level of a country’s gender equality does not have any statistically significant effect on gender gap in educational use of ICT. The negative sign for the coefficient suggests, however, that - surprisingly - more gender-neutral societies are associated with an increasing gender gap in the scores on the index of ICT/internet educational use in favour of boys.

Further information

Relevant publications

Drabowicz, T. (2014). Gender and digital usage inequality among adolescents: a comparative study of 39 countries. Computers & Education, 74, 98–111.

Report accessibility

Journal article

URL of report

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/...

Dataset publicly available

No

Contact details of investigator

tomasz.drabowicz@eui.eu

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