Digital Divide Women (& Gender)

By: Meghan Mehaffey

The first site I chose to search was delicious and no results came up for digital divide
women, so I typed in digital divide gender instead. Most of the top 20 results were
irrelevant or didn't seem to interest me in what I was looking for. I didn't receive any hits
for that search either but instead decided to look up the gender divide of influence on
twitter. I was surprised to see that males use twitter more than females, about 52%
compared to 48%. I feel that the reason for this might be that twitter is essentially an
outlet for males to express their thoughts and emotions that isn't as acceptable in society
but more acceptable on social networking sites. I feel that women might use twitter for
the purpose of following celebrities as well as an outlet, but in society it is more
acceptable for women to be emotionally expressive. The article also goes on to say that
women are more apt to using social networking sites than men in the US. 

The second site I searched was bing, when I typed digital divide women in the search bar
I had plenty of results come up. Most of the ones on the main page were from around the
world but there were a few from the US. Of the first 20 results most were from other
developing countries and some were irrelevant. The first article that popped up was "In
the gender divide women fall behind," I decided I would analyze this one because it
looked interesting. The main issue in this article is that there are limited resources of
information communication technology and even more limited access to who is allowed
to use it. Women are deprived not only in access but in the language barrier, and
education barriers as well. I feel that by educating women and allowing more access we
can help to tear down this barrier. 

The third site I searched was google plain, when I searched here some of the same
articles came up that I looked at on bing. I feel that this site came up with some of the
same results but with more pdf files to look at. I clicked on "Gender and digital divide"
from slideshow and really like that I can see the information in a different form than a
paper or blog. It states that men and women use technology for different reasons, also
that men self taught while women needed assistance. They address issues on what can be
done to bridge the gender gap and I found some of them helpful suggestions. They also
encourage to take action at the end and use some of the suggestions to bridge it. 

The fourth site I searched was google blogs, and turned up that a previous blog was
shown. Most of the top hits were irrelevant to the topic. I didn't see any articles that
would be of interest to me on this search site. Since I wasn’t able to find anything in the
blog area I tried google video instead and found a video on the under representation of
women in all areas of gender divide. I found it informative and enjoyed seeing a different
form of information to look at.

The fifth site I searched was the SCSU library find articles site, I typed digital divide
women in the search bar and came up with only four articles and databases. The one that
was most relevant to my search was "Reducing the digital divide for low-income women
with breast cancer." They were interested in creating a networking system that would
improve quality of life for breast cancer patients, shown that internet networking helps. I
feel that this was an interesting area to read about for the digital divide for women. 

5 facts with sources

 The Internet is one mechanism that has tremendous potential to help these
families cope with breast cancer.
Bridging Digital Divide: Women with Breast Cancer
 Different ways to use technology: men-computer games, women-email
Gender Digital Divide Slideshow
 Without access to information and knowledge, women, who are the majority
of our population are at risk of permanent economic backwardness, which in
turn makes our countries poor.
Women fall behind in digital divide
 In addition to other leading social networks, the study found that women
represent the majority of Twitter’s population.
Twitter Gender Divide
 A video of under representation of women
Where are the women?

What I learned
I was able to find out more about the digital divide through using different search
sites. It was interesting to see all the different results that the sites came up with. I
also was surprised to see that some of the material was irrelevant to my searches
depending on the sites used. I really liked the graphs on the delicious site, and the
video on the google video site. It was nice to be