Perspective and Purpose

The stereotyped view that women and girls could have more negative attitudes towards technology and technology use, and they would be less actively engaged in technology-related activities and behaviors, which could have contributed to the so-called “technological gender gap” (Canada & Brusca, 1993). Because over the past two decades after the quantitative synthesis by Liao (1999), the society has witnessed an exponential growth in the technology development and infiltration in all aspects of the society, and also new studies have been conducted in this area since the last synthesis, it is time that we revisit this issue and take close look at the research findings after the last synthesis (Liao, 1999) with regard to possible gender differences in the attitudes toward technology and its use.

In the area of research for studying attitudes toward technology use, one critical issue is a lack of conceptual clarity for the construct of “attitude.” Whitley (1997), after their review of the relevant research literature in the area of attitudes related to technology use, suggested that the different ways of operationalizing “attitudes” toward technology use in different studies could be categorized into five different, yet related, aspects: affect, beliefs, self-efficacy, mixed and sex-role stereotype. In our review, we attempted to organize and summarize the research studies based on the type of indicators (affect, belief, and self-efficacy) used in a study,

Collis and Williams (2001) discussed that cultural and regional difference was one critical factor in influencing people’s acceptance and use of Internet-based learning resources. The earlier findings suggested that, in different countries, people might have different perceptions and views about information technology (Lee & Brosnan, 1998; Li & Kirkup, 2007). In addition, uneven economic development levels across different regions might affect the gender differences in attitudes toward technology use in different populations. Based on the accessibility of technology, people from different regions may have different understanding about technology use, and different views about the usefulness of technology, which, in turn, would influence their intensions, choices, efforts, and decisions. Such factors may lead to differences in terms of how gender groups view technology use in these own cultural contexts.

In summary, the primary purpose of this study was to provide a quantitative synthesis of the relevant empirical studies on the issue of gender differences in attitudes toward technology uses. Such a quantitative synthesis of the empirical findings has the potential of providing insights into the relevant issues in the research related to attitudes toward technology use that, otherwise, would not be readily available or obvious from individual studies (Fan & Chen, 2001). Specifically, we focus on the following main research questions:

1. Are there gender group differences in attitudes toward technology use as reported in the previous empirical studies over the last two decades?

2. What are the study features (e.g., different aspects of attitude, regions of sampling, type of population, publication year and publication type) that could partially explain the inconsistencies in the findings concerning the gender group differences in attitudes toward technology use across individual studies in the literature?

References Ayalon, H. (2003). Women and men go to university: Mathematical background and gender differences in choice of field in higher education. Sex Roles, 48(5 & 6), 277–290. Canada, K., & Brusca, F. (1993). The technological gender gap: Evidence and recommendations for educators and computer-based instruction designers. Educational Technology Research and Development, 39, 43-51. Collis, B. A., Williams, R. L. (2001). Cross-cultural comparison of gender differences in adolescents' attitudes toward computers and selected school subjects. The Journal of Educational Research, 81(1), 17-27. Fan, X., Chen, M. (2001). Parental involvement and students’ academic achievement: A Meta-Analysis. Educational Psychology Review, 13(1), 1-22. Hedges, L.V. and Olkin, I. (1985) Statistical Methods for Meta-analysis. Orlando, FL: Academic Press. Hedges, L.V. and Vevea, J.L. (1998) Fixed- and random effects models in meta-analysis. Psychological Methods, 3, 486-504. Hunter, J.E. and Schmidt, F.L. (1990) Methods of Meta-analysis: Correcting Error and Bias in Research Findings. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage. Lee, W., Brosnan, M. (1998). A cross-cultural comparison of gender differences in computer attitudes and anxieties: The United Kingdom and Hong Kong. Computers in Human Behavior, 14(4), 559-577. Li, N., Kirkup, G. (2007). Gender and cultural differences in internet use: A study of China and the UK. Computers & Education, 48(2), 301-307. Liao, Y.C. (1999). Gender differences on attitudes toward computers: A meta-analysis. ERIC, ED432287. Whitley Jr., B.E. (1997). Gender Differences in Computer-Related Attitudes and Behavior: A Meta-Analysis. Computers in Human Behavior, 13(1), 1-22.