Abstract
Digitisation and rapidly emerging new technologies are transforming many aspects of life such as education, work, and leisure. These changes lead to a growing demand for new skills related to ICT use, computer literacy, internet use, or technical digital skills. However, the extensive literature on digital inequality provides evidence for significant differences in computer skills along the usual dimensions of social inequality. Due to the omnipresence of digital technologies in everyday life, it is all the more important to know the extent of digital inequality to be able to take appropriate measures to ensure that social participation does not degenerate into a question of social stratification in the Digital Age. In this paper, we provide empirical evidence for socio-economic digital inequality in Austria using survey data from the “Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies” (PIAAC) conducted in 2011/2012.11The data set that supports the findings of this study is available as a scientific use file (SUF) for scientific research made available by Statistics Austria free of charge after conclusion of a data use agreement. We show, for Austria, that higher socio-economic background is positively related to digital problem-solving while being female is negatively correlated. However, when controlling for ICT engagement in everyday life, the positive effect of the socio-economic background only remains significant for groups of people with a very high socio-economic background while the effect of gender becomes statistically insignificant. Furthermore, based on Eurostat data we cannot identify a uniform trend towards a decline of digital inequality since 2012. Our results indicate that disadvantaged population groups in Austria should be encouraged and enabled to integrate ICT usage in their everyday life to reduce digital inequality.
Highlights
The almost-all-encompassing digital transformation of society poses new challenges for people as they are expected to acquire skills and competencies to handle and use digital technologies
We provide empirical evidence for socio-economic digital inequality in Austria using survey data from the ‘‘Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies’’ (PIAAC) conducted in 2011/2012.1 We show, for Austria, that higher socio-economic background is positively related to digital problem-solving while being female is negatively correlated
Both findings are robust when controlling for age, education, language and urbanisation where only age and education are statistically significant with the expected signs, confirming results from existing research on digital inequality in OECD countries (e.g., [7,11,13,15,17,32,34])
Summary
The almost-all-encompassing digital transformation of society poses new challenges for people as they are expected to acquire skills and competencies to handle and use digital technologies. The growing demand for these skills is not limited to specific professions but covers the whole world of work since the share of employment in jobs characterised by medium or high degrees of digitisation has increased significantly since 2002 [3] and is expected to do so in the future [2] In view of these developments, the ‘‘old’’ issue of the digital divide is once again becoming more topical. Since technology acceptance models (TAM) predict that the use of technologies increases over time irrespective of individual differences [19,20], one should be able to see rising ICT use across different population groups Whether this helps to overcome digital inequality depends on the rate of changes in ICT use of the digital ‘forerunners’ compared to the digital ‘laggards’.
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