The empowerment of singleton daughters: exploring the gender digital divide among Chinese college students
Information Technology & People
ISSN: 0959-3845
Article publication date: 31 August 2020
Issue publication date: 19 August 2021
Abstract
Purpose
Existing researches find that a gender difference exists in terms of Internet usage. In China, the singleton daughters resulting from China's one-child policy enjoy unprecedented parental support. The purpose of this paper is to investigate whether singleton daughters can, to some extent, break through the predicament of the digital divide.
Design/methodology/approach
The study collected data from a sample of 865 college students and obtained 811 valid questionnaires. Exploratory factor analysis (EFA) is used to identify clusters of Internet usage from the perspective of statistical associations in various daily online activities. Two-way ANOVA and mean-comparison tests are used to analyze how singleton and non-singleton students use the Internet differently.
Findings
This study finds that singleton female students showed no significant differences from male students in aspirational activities of informational, educational use and social media use, which means that singleton female students have caught up with male students in these activities. However, female college students from multi-child families were still found to be disadvantaged in those activities.
Originality/value
There is a lack of consensus on the classification of Internet activities. We used EFA to cluster the varieties of Internet activities into three types: utilitarian use, exploratory use and aspirational use. The three identified types of Internet usage require different degrees of user initiative. We argue that initiative provides a useful lens through which to classify Internet usage. In addition, this study is among the few studies to investigate the impact of the one-child policy on the gender digital divide.
Keywords
Acknowledgements
This project is supported by the Science and Technology Project of Chengdu City (2019-RK00–00017-ZF), the Humanity and Social Science Foundation of Southwest Petroleum University (2019RW016) and the National Social Science Fund of China (18VSJ057). Zhang, Ruokun of Hubei University of Education contributed to the questionnaire design and data collection.
Citation
Zhang, P., Wang, L. and Liu, C. (2021), "The empowerment of singleton daughters: exploring the gender digital divide among Chinese college students", Information Technology & People, Vol. 34 No. 5, pp. 1401-1418. https://doi.org/10.1108/ITP-07-2019-0350
Publisher
:Emerald Publishing Limited
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