ESZTER HARGITTAI'S RESEARCH Differences in Actual and Perceived Online Skills: The Role of Gender. [pdf] [click for full article] by Eszter Hargittai and Steven Shafer 2006. Social Science Quarterly. 87(2):432-448. June. Abstract The literature on gender and technology use finds that women and men differ significantly in their attitudes toward their technological abilities. Concurrently, existing work on science and math abilities of students suggests that such perceived differences do not always translate into actual disparities. There has been little work exploring gender differences with respect to Internet use ability, especially based on a diverse sample of adult users. We use new data on Web-use skill to test empirically whether there are differences in men's and women's abilities to navigate online content. Findings suggest that men and women do not differ greatly in their online abilities. However, we find that women's self-assessed skill is significantly lower than that of men. We discuss the implications of these findings for social inequality with respect to Internet use. Outline I. Introduction II. Gender and Technology Use  II.A Attitudes toward technologies and technical competencies  II.B Experience using computers and the Web III. Data and Methodology  III.A Sampling  III.B Study session  III.C Sample descriptives IV. Findings  IV.A Differences in Web-use skill  IV.B Differences in online abilities between men and women V. Discussion & Conclusion Acknowledgements We would like to thank Marcy Carlson, Laura Clawson, Paul DiMaggio, Shane Greenstein, Robert Max Jackson, Alexandra Kalev, and Caroline Hodges Persell for helpful suggestions. We are also grateful to Susan Lutz and Inna Barmash for their assistance with data collection and we appreciate the logistical help from Hank Farber and Betty Leydon. We would also like to express our gratitude to the many people who took time from their busy schedules to participate in this study. Generous support from the Markle Foundation and NSF grant #IIS0086143 is kindly acknowledged. The project has also been supported in part by a grant from the Russell Sage Foundation, and through a grant from the Pew Charitable Trusts to the Center for Arts and Cultural Policy Studies, Princeton University. The first author is also grateful to the Dan David Foundation for its support. Please note This is a pre-print version of the article to appear in Social Science Quarterly. You may not post this document on any Web sites or distribute it on any mailing lists. You can point people to its online location here: http://www.eszter.com/research/a17-genderskills.html.