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Impact of Internet Use on Gendered Research Culture in UK Academia

This paper explores how increased Internet use affects gendered research culture in UK academia, analyzing survey data on male and female academics' Internet habits. It discusses the digital gender divide, research culture, and the importance of the Internet in academia.

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Impact of Internet Use on Gendered Research Culture in UK Academia

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  1. Gender Inequality and the Research Imperative – What Is the Impact of the Internet? Anne Manuel University of Bristol

  2. What is This Paper About? • Aim – to consider the effect that increased use of the Internet might have had on gendered research culture in UK academe • Part of a larger mixed methods study • Quantitative data from a survey looking at several aspects of Internet use amongst a sample of male and female academics

  3. Background 1 – Why is it important? • Unequal academy (Knights and Richards 2003) • Research and the RAE (Harley 2003, Court 1999) • The Digital Divide (Liff and Shepherd 2004)

  4. Background 2 – Research Culture and Gender • Publish or perish – RAE • The Game (Lucas 2001) • The stakes (Court 1999) • Meritocracy (Knights and Richards 2003, Harley 2003)

  5. Background 3 – Internet and Gender • Digital gender divide (Ford and Miller 1996, Schumacher and Morahan-Martin 2001) • Differences in use (Liff and Shepherd 2004) • Technofeminism – communicating and networking

  6. Background 4 – the survey • Initial data gathering exercise • Informing interview series • Developing some initial indicators • Making contacts in the community

  7. Method • Online survey using a tool developed at ILRT • 12 pre and 11 post 1992 universities • 3 disciplines economics, history, biology • Three separate contacts • 214 responses

  8. Responses • Approx 11% rate • 71:29 ratio male to female • Age • Part-time/fulltime • Pre-post 1992 universities • Focus of roles

  9. Use of New Technologies - range

  10. Use of New Technologies - extent

  11. Importance of the Internet to Academics • What would suffer most if no Internet for 1 month? • 7% of women and 19% of men said ‘nothing’ • Literature searching only significant association

  12. Comments • ‘I would be able to get on with real research’ • ‘Too scary to think about’ • ‘All of it but I would be a much happier person’

  13. Home Access

  14. Attitudes towards the Internet

  15. Conclusions • Isolated differences between men and women • Some significant departures: • Home pages • Searching for conferences and publishers/journals • Reliance on the Internet

  16. Conclusions • Home access – qualitative analysis • Attitudes – quality vs quantity

  17. Anne Manuel Anne.manuel@bristol.ac.uk http://www.survey.bris.ac.uk/ilrt/internetsurvey

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