Self-esteem issues have pervaded society for centuries, but many probably don’t realize it is now a part of using the Internet.
A recent study by a Northwestern professor found that although men and women are equally skilled at using the Internet, women underestimate their Internet usage skills while men do the opposite.
The study, written by assistant professor of communication studies Eszter Hargittai, was published last month in Social Science Quarterly, a leading sociological journal. “Because Web uses can influence so many aspects of one’s life, the finding that women are significantly more likely to exhibit lower self-perception of their actual online skills than do men has widespread implications for the potential benefits – or lack thereof – that female users may reap from this important medium,” wrote Hargittai with co-author Steven Shafer in the conclusion of their published paper.
Hargittai started studying Internet skills while working for a doctorate at Princeton University. Shafer is still there, also working for a doctorate. The two met at Princeton before Hargittai finished in 2003.
Hargittai didn’t focus on gender when she began observing 100 New Jersey residents performing set Internet tasks in 2001. She was more interested in doing a study on actual Internet skills.
The participants ranged in age from 18 to 81 and included 49 men and 51 women. They were asked to find museums, tax forms and other pieces of information on the Internet. Women and men of various incomes, ages and levels of information performed similarly, showing there to be very little actual variation between men and women in Internet proficiency.
“It’s very rare to collect data on actual Internet skill, and so actual skill was the focus of my study,” Hargittai said. “The perception part was mostly extra. I wasn’t even focused on gender. It was only once I analyzed the data and looked at their self-perceptions that I saw what had happened.”
But in Hargittai’s survey, no woman – regardless of previous individual Internet usage – labeled herself an “expert,” and no man labeled himself “not skilled at all.” Men tended to identify themselves between “fairly skilled” and “very skilled,” while women chose “not very skilled” through “fairly skilled.” Their actual performance and usage sometimes showed otherwise.
To further study this issue of perception versus skill in gender, Hargittai asked Shafer to help her. He was interested in gender; Hargittai had never studied it: Her main area of study was information technologies and their social and policy implications.
Hargittai re-interviewed subjects this spring, finding that their skill level and self-perception were still in conflict. Her findings support similar research done in math and science, which shows that women – while as proficient and skilled as men – still hold lower self-perceptions.
“I think it’s connected to the technological domain,” Hargittai said. “When a new computer product comes out, they’ll never say, ‘It’s so easy your father could use it.’ It’s always the mother. Generally, people need to adjust their expectations.”
Hargittai is herself an active member of the online community. She has posted her research on her own blog (at www.eszter.com/research) and contributes to the community blog www.crookedtimber.org. She will spend the next academic year as a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University before returning to NU.
She recently also started a study of Internet usage and perceptions among students at University of Illinois-Chicago and in the future will do observations.
“It may just be that women are less confident than men, regardless of domain,” Hargittai said. “But we don’t know.”
Reach Matt Weir at [email protected].
