RT Journal Article
T1 Evolution of the internet gender gaps in Spain and effects of the Covid-19 pandemic
A1 Garín-Muñoz, Teresa
A1 Pérez Amaral, Teodosio
A1 Valarezo Unda, Ángel Eduardo
AB 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.
PB Elsevier
SN 0308-5961
YR 2022
FD 2022
LK https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14352/100851
UL https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14352/100851
LA eng
NO Garín-Muñoz, Teresa, et al. «Evolution of the Internet Gender Gaps in Spain and Effects of the Covid-19 Pandemic». Telecommunications Policy, vol. 46, n.o 8, septiembre de 2022, p. 102371. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.telpol.2022.102371.
DS Docta Complutense
RD 6 jul 2025