The usage of Information Technology has expanded dramatically in today’s homes, business organizations and Government departments Technology has become an inevitable part of human life. Researchers have come up with various models and theories to investigate factors that influence the extent to which humans use computers and its applications. Unified Theory of Adoption and Use of Technology (UTAUT) is the latest model which has been conceived to understand the nature of technology usage and has been applied in various domains like education, banking, health care etc. Gender has been attributed as a significant variable in explaining the technology acceptance behaviour of humans. The objective of this study is to review the existing literature on the technology usage and intention to use technology from the gender perspective. It has been observed from the review that in few contexts, gender plays a significant role in determining the intention of accepting new technology and there are cases where gender differences cannot be discerned.
The usage of Information Technology has expanded dramatically in today’s homes, business organizations and Government departments. Card, S. K. et al. (1983) stated that the interaction between humans and computer had remarkably increased for the purpose of completing any task [
In spite of institutional efforts to reduce gender inequalities, women in many countries in comparison to their male counterparts, encounter a significant disadvantage in areas such as education, politics and workplace discrimination. Mayoux pointed out that women faced more challenges in terms of socio-cultural, educational and technological issues than men when managing their business ventures [
Various theoretical models have been established to study the behavioral intentions to adopt technologies. Such models are the Theory of Reasoned Action (TRA) [
The objective of this study is to review the existing literature on the technology usage and intention to use technology from the gender perspective.
In this study, we discussed the framework of the two prominent technology adoption models, namely, Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) and Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology (UTAUT) in Section 2. Thereafter in Section 3, we have surveyed literature spanning from 2000 till 2015 to discuss how the adoption and usage of various ICT applications such as Information Technology, e learning, e banking, e commerce, stock trading and social media differ on the basis of gender. In the last section, we present the conclusions.
In the initial TAM Model, Davis states that the success of a system is determined by the user acceptance of the system which is measured by three factors: perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use and attitudes towards usage of the system. Davis (1989) defined Perceived Usefulness as “the degree to which a person believes that using a particular system would enhance his or her performance” and Perceived Ease of Use as “the degree to which a person believes that using a particular system would be free of effort” [
Later, Davis and Venkatesh (1996) modified the model and eliminated attitude variable as they found through a study that attitude played a minor role in system usage behavior [
UTAUT model consists of four core determinants of intention and usage: Performance Expectancy, Effort Expectancy, Social Influence and Facilitating Conditions and also of four moderators of key relationships: Gender, Age, Experience and Voluntariness. The core determinants are the key factors which influence directly the user’s behavioral intention to use new technologies. Moderators are factors, which control the influence of the key factors (
Using the Unified Theory of Adoption and Use of Technology (UTAUT) Model, Nysveen et al. (2005) studied
Variable | Type | Definition |
---|---|---|
Performance Expectancy (PE) | Independent | The degree to which an individual believes that using the system would help him/her to attain gains in job performance |
Effort Expectancy (EE) | Independent | The degree of ease associated with the usage of the system |
Social Influence (SI) | Independent | The degree to which an individual perceives that other important persons believe that he/she should use the system |
Facilitating Condition (FC) | Independent | The degree to which an individual believes that an organizational and technical infrastructure exists to support use of the system. |
Behavioral Intention (BI) | Dependent | An indication of an individual’s readiness to perform a given behavior |
684 mobile chat service users in Norway were being studied and found that perceived usefulness in using mobile chat services is stronger for men than women [
Amongst 630 Anglo American undergraduates, Jackson et al. (2001) found that emails are used more by women than men whereas men use Web more than women [
Calvert et al. (2005) had interviewed 1065 parents to know about the media habits of children aged 6 months to 6 years, in the U.S and found that at younger ages there was no difference between boys and girls in using computer but however the interest level of the girls diminished at later stages [
Gender differences have been studied in diverse range of disciplines. By implementing extended Technology Acceptance Model (TAM), Okazaki and Santos (2012) studied 446 faculty members in Brazil with respect to adoption of e learning tools. They used Structural Modelling Analysis and found that statistically significant differences exists between male and female with respect to three relations i.e. between ease of use and perceived usefulness, between perceived usefulness and attitude and between intention of use and actual behavior [
Raman et al. (2014) investigated 65 postgraduate students in Malaysia with respect to the use of Moodle and found that the gender does not influence Performance Expectancy (PE), Effort Expectancy (EE) and Social Influence (SI) towards Behavioural Intention (BI) [
With the growth of Internet and intensive penetration of mobile phones, banks have been extensively promoting the mobile and Internet banking systems. Studies have shown that gender is a significant factor in influencing adoption of mobile banking. Laukkanen and Pasanen (2008) studied 2675 customers of Scandinavian Bank in Finland and by applying backward stepwise method of logistic regression analysis, it has been revealed that men are more likely to use mobile banking services than women [
On the contrary, Foon and Fah (2011) surveyed 200 respondents in Malaysia, it has been found that gender difference is not significant in Internet banking adoption [
Yu (2012) utilized the UTAUT Model to study the factors in adopting mobile banking. Through empirical evidence, he revealed that effort expectancy and social influence were not significantly moderated by gender while performance expectancy is the only construct that was controlled by gender [
With respect to electronic commerce, Bae and Lee (2011) noticed that women attached more risk to online shopping and are more concerned with privacy issues [
Jones et al. (2009) claimed that males are more frequent Internet users and consequently, their usage of e commerce sites is also very high [
Based on a modified UTAUT Model, Tai and Ku (2013) surveyed 329 stock investors in Taiwan and concluded that the effect of social influence on behavioural intention was significant for males, but non-significant for females. This may be due to the relatively advanced and complex technologies involved in stock trading, thus, reducing the chance of being influenced by the peer groups. They also concluded that people who are having high performance expectancy reveal a strong intention to use mobile stock trading [
In the contrary, Li et al. (2002) used sample size of 3759 households in US to study the intention to take up e trading and found that gender inequalities do not exist but young investors are willing to take risk in e-trading [
Nowadays, social media is a very popular ICT application and also plays an active role among youngsters. After studying 450 Indian young adults in an urban area, it has been revealed that 6.67% of the females spent more than three hours in social network sites as compared to 6.04% males. Also, with respect to time spent on social network sites for more than two hours, percentage for females was 7.44 as compared to 3.85 for males [
After studying 22,670 profiles of social media application called MySpace in the U.S, it has been found that this social network site was mainly used by teenagers; with females being keen on making friendship and males being interested in dating [
From the literature review, it can be observed that there are mixed results with respect to the influence of gender on technology adoption. While in few contexts, gender plays a significant role in determining the intention of accepting new technology, there are cases where gender differences cannot be discerned. In the context of usage of Information Technology which includes computers, email services, electronic data management systems etc., gender acts as an influencing factor in technology adoption as men are found to be more technologically adept compared to women. In terms of mobile or Internet banking, there has been a mixed observation from the authors regarding the impact of gender. Similarly, gender difference is not being observed with respect to interaction via social media but the males and females do have different agenda in using social network sites. Females mainly use the social network for “maintaining existing relationships” whereas males use it for “making new friends”. In the fields of mobile/electronic commerce, males and females are found to be equally using online shopping but women are more influenced towards consumer reviews than men. Majority of the literature on acceptance of e-learning applications highlighted that gender was a significant factor, which was also the case in online stock trading, where many of the researchers had concluded that females faced technical challenges and risk in using technology.
This review can help the future researchers to identify techniques by which the gender gap in technology acceptance in the above discussed domains can be addressed. Institutions both private and public, can design programmes aimed at enhancing the skills of the females who are more apprehensive about using emerging ICT applications.
AnanyaGoswami,SraboniDutta, (2016) Gender Differences in Technology Usage—A Literature Review. Open Journal of Business and Management,04,51-59. doi: 10.4236/ojbm.2016.41006