A Northwestern University study finds that men are more likely to share their creative work online than women despite the fact that women and men engage in creative activities at essentially equal rates.
“Because sharing information on the Internet today is a form of participating in public culture and contributing to public discourse, that tells us men’s voices are being disproportionately heard,” says Eszter Hargittai, assistant professor of communication studies at Northwestern University. Hargittai co-authored the study with Northwestern researcher Gina Walejko.
Overall, almost two-thirds of men reported posting their work online while only half of women reported doing so. When Hargittai and Northwestern's Walejko controlled for self-reported digital literacy and Web know-how, however, they found that men and women actually posted their material about equally.
“This suggests that the Internet is not an equal playing field for men and women since those with more online abilities -- whether perceived or actual -- are more likely to contribute online content,” says Hargittai.
The study titled “The Participation Divide: Content Creation and Sharing in the Digital Age” recently appeared in the journal Information, Communication and Society.
“It appears that lack of perceived skill is holding women back from putting their creative content out there,” says Hargittai. She says that other factors that may be responsible for the observed difference, although not measured in the study, may relate to lack of confidence in the quality of one’s work or privacy concerns....
Comments
This study was limited to creative works like music and movies. Does anyone know of a similar study on research literature or data? For example, has anyone looked at how self-archiving breaks down along sex lines?
Note this important qualifier: "When Hargittai and Northwestern's Walejko controlled for self-reported digital literacy and Web know-how, however, they found that men and women actually posted their material about equally." Hence, if you're looking for causes, look more for differences in web skills (actual and self-reported) than for some hypothetical sex-based difference in willingness to share. That raises an intriguing question. Do differences in web skills (actual and self-reported) affect the rates of self-archiving in similar ways? Is it possible that lack of web skills (actual and self-reported) is a little-noticed but gradually-vanishing obstacle to green OA?
Update. See our earlier post on RePEC data on the balance of male and female self-archiving in economics. Women represent 19% of economics faculty in the US but 14.5% of RePEc authors. On the 1000 top-cited economists on Tom Coupé’s list, 32.4% of the men are not represented in RePEc, but 44.4% of the women are not represented in RePEc.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 6/24/2008 06:04:00 PM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
