Garín-Muñoz Teresa, Pérez-Amaral Teodosio, Valarezo Ángel
Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia, UNED, Spain.
Instituto Complutense de Análisis Económico, UCM, Spain.
Telecomm Policy. 2022 Sep;46(8):102371. doi: 10.1016/j.telpol.2022.102371. Epub 2022 May 5.
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.
新技术领域存在一种广泛接受的观点，即随着一项服务达到高度成熟的水平，使用该服务方面的数字鸿沟将会消失。本文所展示的研究表明这一观点存在争议。来自西班牙的数据证明了性别差距仍然存在，在西班牙，每日互联网用户占人口的75.9%。本文探讨了这种差距是否能完全由男女之间的社会经济差异来解释。我们构建了一个微观面板模型，并纳入了一组社会经济变量（年龄、教育程度、收入、就业状况、数字技能和常住人口），这些变量使我们能够分离出性别对成为每日互联网用户这一决策的影响。结果表明，互联网差距是一个具有特定性别因素的现象。在其他条件相同的情况下，女性会对使用互联网的概率产生负面影响。将类似模型应用于15种互联网服务，我们发现性别对于解释使用每种服务的可能性总是具有显著影响。然而，在某些服务（15种中的7种）中，这种影响对女性有利，而对于其他服务（8种），性别影响对男性有利。本文通过分析新冠疫情第一波对互联网服务使用的影响来得出结论，特别关注其对性别差距可能产生的影响。
