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Gender and the Use of the Internet at Home

Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, Melbourne, Australia

In the United States and Australia, men and women use the internet in nearly equal measure, whereas in Japan, India and China, men continue to dominate internet use. This article focuses on gender differences in the use of the internet at home as seen from women's perspectives and draws particularly on open-ended interviews in 1999 with 30 middle-income Anglo-Celtic women with internet access in urban and rural areas of Australia. The study found that women generally use the internet as a tool for activities, rather than as play or a technology to be mastered. This partially explains why women farmers use the internet more extensively than their farmer husbands. When women become comfortable with technology - as with the telephone or the PC on a farm - women see it as a tool rather than a technology. Women's continued discomfort with technology thus remains at the centre of the social construct of gender and technology.

Key Words: communication • domestication gender • internet use • tool technology

New Media & Society, Vol. 3, No. 4, 395-415 (2001)
DOI: 10.1177/1461444801003004001


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