Chat 4 Discussion Starter
Women and IT Careers
by Dr Supriya Singh
Gender, Design and Electronic Commerce
Women use the Internet at home less than men – 14 per cent against 20 per cent for men. The gap is greater for electronic commerce – 5 per cent for men compared to 2 per cent for women. We have tried to understand the reasons and implications of this gender gap through open ended interviews with 30 Anglo-Celtic women in middle-income households with Internet access.
We found that:
- Women use the Internet less at home than men. This seemingly fits in with women’s lack of comfort with technology. Our interviews show that when women become comfortable with technology, women no longer see it as technology. Hence at the centre of the social construct of gender is a discomfort with technology.
- Differences in men and women’s extent of use cannot wholly be explained by differences in women’s skills, expertise and education or the rural urban divide. The difference in use can be influenced by the location of the PC with the Internet, but a change in location does not always lead to a change in use.
- In farm households, women use the PC and the Internet more routinely and frequently than the men.
- Women use the Internet as a tool for activities, rather than a technology to be mastered.
- Women seldom associate the use of the Internet with play, gadgetry, machinery and power.
- Women prefer personal and contextualised channels of communication. Women who perceive e-mail as a personal communication channel are more likely to use it as part of a mix of channels for personal communication.
- E-mail is leading to more frequent personal communication, particularly across time and distance. The nature of this personal communication is changing as e-mail straddles the boundaries of spoken and written communication, synchronous and asynchronous conversation.
- E-mail is substituting partially for personal letters and less so for the telephone.
A focus on women’s use leads us to conclude that for the domestication of the Internet, designers and policy makers would need to understand these characteristics of women’s use of the Internet. We are not saying there is an absolute divide, but that women perceive there are gender differences. If we chart a continuum of Internet use, more women are on the "technology as a tool" side than the "technology as play" side.
For the domestication of electronic commerce, there will need to be greater attention paid to gender differences in the use of the Internet.