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Evolution of the internet gender gaps in Spain and effects of the Covid-19 pandemic

There is a widely accepted belief in new technologies that the digital divide in using a service will disappear as the service reaches an advanced level of maturity. The work presented here shows that this idea is debatable. Data from Spain, a country where daily internet users are 75.9 percent of t...

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Autores principales: Garín-Muñoz, Teresa, Pérez-Amaral, Teodosio, Valarezo, Ángel
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd. 2022
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9068793/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/35542497
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.telpol.2022.102371
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author Garín-Muñoz, Teresa
Pérez-Amaral, Teodosio
Valarezo, Ángel
author_facet Garín-Muñoz, Teresa
Pérez-Amaral, Teodosio
Valarezo, Ángel
author_sort Garín-Muñoz, Teresa
collection PubMed
description There is a widely accepted belief in new technologies that the digital divide in using a service will disappear as the service reaches an advanced level of maturity. The work presented here shows that this idea is debatable. Data from Spain, a country where daily internet users are 75.9 percent of the population, prove that the gender gap still exists. The paper explores if this gap can be entirely explained by the socioeconomic differences between men and women. We build a micro panel model and incorporate a set of socioeconomic variables (age, education, income, employment status, digital skills, and resident population) that allow us to isolate the effects of gender on the decision to become a daily Internet user. The results conclude that the Internet gap is a phenomenon with a specific gender component. Other things being equal a woman negatively affects the probability of using the Internet. Applying a similar model to 15 Internet services, we obtain that gender is always significant to explain the likelihood of being a user of each service. However, in some services (7 out of 15), the effect is favorable to women, and for other services (8), the gender effect favors men. The work concludes by analyzing the impact of the first wave of the Covid-19 pandemic on the use of Internet services, paying particular attention to its possible implications for the gender gap.
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spelling pubmed-90687932022-05-04 Evolution of the internet gender gaps in Spain and effects of the Covid-19 pandemic Garín-Muñoz, Teresa Pérez-Amaral, Teodosio Valarezo, Ángel Telecomm Policy Article There is a widely accepted belief in new technologies that the digital divide in using a service will disappear as the service reaches an advanced level of maturity. The work presented here shows that this idea is debatable. Data from Spain, a country where daily internet users are 75.9 percent of the population, prove that the gender gap still exists. The paper explores if this gap can be entirely explained by the socioeconomic differences between men and women. We build a micro panel model and incorporate a set of socioeconomic variables (age, education, income, employment status, digital skills, and resident population) that allow us to isolate the effects of gender on the decision to become a daily Internet user. The results conclude that the Internet gap is a phenomenon with a specific gender component. Other things being equal a woman negatively affects the probability of using the Internet. Applying a similar model to 15 Internet services, we obtain that gender is always significant to explain the likelihood of being a user of each service. However, in some services (7 out of 15), the effect is favorable to women, and for other services (8), the gender effect favors men. The work concludes by analyzing the impact of the first wave of the Covid-19 pandemic on the use of Internet services, paying particular attention to its possible implications for the gender gap. The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd. 2022-09 2022-05-05 /pmc/articles/PMC9068793/ /pubmed/35542497 http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.telpol.2022.102371 Text en © 2022 The Authors Since January 2020 Elsevier has created a COVID-19 resource centre with free information in English and Mandarin on the novel coronavirus COVID-19. The COVID-19 resource centre is hosted on Elsevier Connect, the company's public news and information website. Elsevier hereby grants permission to make all its COVID-19-related research that is available on the COVID-19 resource centre - including this research content - immediately available in PubMed Central and other publicly funded repositories, such as the WHO COVID database with rights for unrestricted research re-use and analyses in any form or by any means with acknowledgement of the original source. These permissions are granted for free by Elsevier for as long as the COVID-19 resource centre remains active.
spellingShingle Article
Garín-Muñoz, Teresa
Pérez-Amaral, Teodosio
Valarezo, Ángel
Evolution of the internet gender gaps in Spain and effects of the Covid-19 pandemic
title Evolution of the internet gender gaps in Spain and effects of the Covid-19 pandemic
title_full Evolution of the internet gender gaps in Spain and effects of the Covid-19 pandemic
title_fullStr Evolution of the internet gender gaps in Spain and effects of the Covid-19 pandemic
title_full_unstemmed Evolution of the internet gender gaps in Spain and effects of the Covid-19 pandemic
title_short Evolution of the internet gender gaps in Spain and effects of the Covid-19 pandemic
title_sort evolution of the internet gender gaps in spain and effects of the covid-19 pandemic
topic Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9068793/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/35542497
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.telpol.2022.102371
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