Experience and Internet News: The Real Reason for The online New Reading Gender Gap

Experience and Internet News: The Real Reason for the

Online News Reading Gender Gap

by

Amy Schmitz Weiss, Master's Student

Sharon Meraz, Master's Student

Nilo Figur, Doctoral Student

Paula M. Poindexter, Associate Professor

School of Journalism

University of Texas at Austin

Austin, TX 78712

Presented to:

Newspaper Division

AEJMC Annual Convention

Kansas City, MO

July 2003

Introduction

Reading news is now the third most popular activity on the Internet behind e-mailing and Web browsing. According to the most recent UCLA Internet Report , 52% of the U.S. population now reads news online. After the development of the World Wide Web in the early 1990s and the Netscape Navigator Web browser in 1994, the Internet became attractive to consumers and media companies as a viable new medium for communication, entertainment, and news and information. The dramatic increase of news Web sites from 60 newspapers online in 1994 to more than 3,300 newspaper, television and cable news Web sites by 2003 as well as the cross-promotion from traditional newspapers and television and cable newscasts have contributed to the popularity of news on the Internet.

Although reading news online is among the top three activities on the Internet, statistics continue to show that men and women do not read Internet news equally. In fact, the most recent Pew Research Center study reported that 57% of men read news online while only 43% of women read news on the Internet. This gender disparity in attention to news is unique to the Internet; for other news media use, there is no difference between men and women.

Historically research studies have found differences in how men and women read newspapers and what content in the newspaper they pay attention to, but no significant differences have been found in overall newspaper reading. Similarly, no significant gender differences have been found in newsmagazine reading and regular attention paid to television news, cable news, and radio news. If there is no gender difference in regular use of traditional and cable news, why is there a gender disparity in Internet news reading? Is this difference in reading news on the Internet due to gender or is it due to other factors? This study seeks to answer that question by exploring the real reason for the gender gap in reading news on the Internet.

Theoretical Links

Diffusion of Innovation. The Internet has spread more rapidly than any other electronic technology, taking only 7 years to reach 30 percent of households, in comparison to 38 years for the telephone and 17 years for television. Diffusion of innovation theory provides insight into how and why new media and technologies such as the Internet, the telephone, and television are adopted into society. Rogers identified five characteristics that determine the acceptance of a technology by an individual: relative advantage, compatibility, complexity, trialability and observability. Fidler added a sixth attributeÐŽXfamiliarityÐŽXexplicating that new media technology essentially emerge or evolve from the metamorphosis of older media. Lin emphasized the importance of resources or the high financial cost to the individual adoption of computer technology, which makes computers the most discontinuous of media technologies. Atkin, Jeffres and Neuendorf noted that no discussion of Internet adoption would be complete without recognition of the requirement of computer ownership and skills. Before adopting a technology, Rogers said that an individual goes through a decision framework, which includes knowledge, persuasion, decision, implementation and reinforcement.

Rogers also identified five groups based on the time it took to adopt technology: innovators, early adopters, early majority, late majority and laggards. Early adopters were high risk takers with higher technical skills and higher education and income, while later adopters tended to have lower technical skills and socioeconomic status. Rogers found that demographic characteristics such as age , race, and gender were irrelevant to when individuals adopted an innovation.

Although the theory suggests there should not be a relationship between gender and adoption, a gender difference in Internet news reading continues to be found. The question is:

Is the difference due to gender or to some other factors? This study will answer that question.

Literature Review

Adoption of Technology. Most studies on the adoption of technology have focused on the role of demographic variables and experience. James and Wotring examined the adoption of electronic bulletin boards and found that users had better occupations, higher education, and higher incomes; however, it was not found that users were younger than the general population. The authors also found that more males than females used the technology and concluded, ÐŽ§the information empowered are imbalanced towards males.ЎЁ

Jeffres and Atkin examined the adoption of ISDN (Integrated Systems Digital Networks) technology, a technology that incorporates the merger of television, telephone, and the computer, and found a negative relationship between education and income and interest in the technology as a communication medium as well as a negative relationship between education and the use of technology for consumer purposes. Gender was unrelated to the communication variables.

Age and income were related to personal computer adoption in Lin's study of adoption rate and adopter types (adopters, potential adopters, and non-adopters). Early adopters of personal computers tended to be younger (mean age of 35) and more affluent (mean annual income of $50,000). Education and gender did not predict adoption rates.

Age was inversely related to Internet access in an adoption study by Atkin and Jeffres but education and income were positively related. The authors found no support for the hypotheses that communication needs drive higher rates of adoption or that Internet adopters