The gender gap in digital literacy: a cohort analysis for Germany

Abstract

ABSTRACT Digital skills are critical for promoting gender equality, economic empowerment, and bridging the digital divide. This paper presents stylized facts on the gender gap in digital literacy for a total of 35,661 individuals ranging from pupils to adults using data from the German National Educational Panel Study (NEPS). We detect no gender gap in digital competences between boys and girls in lower secondary education, but the emergence of a gender gap from upper secondary education onwards. We also document that teenagers’ access to digital devices is associated with higher digital skills – and sharing a computer with other household members is less detrimental for female than for male teenagers. For adults, we show that studying or working in a STEM-related field is positively associated with a female respondent’s digital competences. This could be either due to digital literacy driving selection into STEM, or the effects of studying or working in STEM on digital competences. While we can identify several risk factors leading to lower digital competences, a decomposition exercise reveals that composition effects are unlikely to explain our findings.