Gender Inequality on the Internet Access and Use in Indonesia: Evidence and Implications

Gender equality is a substantial means of sustainable economy as well as providing benefits to the society and humanity. Unfortunately, the gender gap persists worldwide, hindering women from reaching their full potential. It is essential to measure existing gender gaps as an initial step prior to establishing an appropriate policy to promote the equality. This study focuses on examining the gap in Information and Communication Technology (ICT), especially in the access and use of the Internet. Removing the gap in ICT is important because ICT is potential in promoting the equality in other fields. We propose a logistic model regression to measure the gender gap in Internet access, and a cross-tabulation to measure the differences on Internet use. We employ a logistic regression due to its ability to present the likelihood of internet users to be male compared to female. The model is applied on the data collected from 9574 respondents in 34 provinces in 2016, covering urban and rural areas. The results show that gender gap in Internet access exists in which the male has 1.046 times the likelihood to be an internet user than female. However, the difference is statistically insignificant. Concerning the Internet usage, male participation is relatively higher than female for most activities. The gap in rural areas, in both access and usage, is relatively higher than in urban areas. This implies that there is more potential in rural areas that cannot be maximized. There are several barriers for women to adopt the Internet, namely awareness, affordability of devices as well as service cost, digital skills, online security, and relevant contents. To close the gender gap, it is mandatory for all stakeholders to perform coordinated and concerted actions to remove the barriers. The existence of higher gaps in rural areas indicates the need to pay more attention and to devote higher efforts to realize the equality.