Digital Gender Gaps in Students’ Knowledge, Attitudes and Skills: An Integrative Data Analysis Across 32 Countries

Abstract

Studying digital gender inequalities is a critical issue in education today. The so-called “digital gender divides” can exist not only in students’ access to and usage of ICT but also in their attitudes toward technology, digital knowledge, skills, and learning outcomes. Given that the extant body of research has mainly studied these divides in isolation and largely ignored their dependencies, we investigate how they relate to each other using large-scale data from multiple studies. Specifically, we analyzed the student data from the International Computer and Information Literacy Study (ICILS) in 2013 and 2018 and synthesized the links between digital gender divides in digital skills and attitudes toward technology after controlling for divides in ICT access across studies. Our findings suggested that (a) girls had a higher performance than boys in digital skills (\beta = -0.11 to -0.29); (b) gender divides in attitudes toward technology partly explained the gender divides in digital skills; (c) significant variation across countries and the types of digital skills and attitudes existed. We conclude that attitudes toward technology are key predictors of the gender divides in digital skills and that the first- and second-level gender digital divides are connected.