Gender Divide Research Articles

The Influence of Peers on the Gender Divide Within Secondary Technology Education in Aotearoa, New Zealand

According to New Zealand government statistics, there is a consistent male–female divide within technology education in secondary schools, resulting in an ongoing underrepresentation of male students in fashion and textiles and female students in computer science and resistant materials learning areas. This underrepresentation is concerning as it contradicts the inclusion promoted in the New Zealand Curriculum and may contribute to reduced opportunities for a talented and diverse workforce. A large body of literature is dedicated to the underrepresentation of female students in STEM fields and has predominantly focused on female students in mathematics and science. However, minimal research focuses on the technology curriculum within the Aotearoa New Zealand context. This qualitative exploratory study investigated students’ perceptions of gender-typing and gender stereotypes within technology education and the experiences of students engaged in technology subjects in which they are gender minorities. Data were gathered through semi-structured interviews. The findings from the thematic analysis revealed that peers and the need for social connection impacted the experiences of gender minority students in their class and influenced their subject selection.

Spatial Spillover of the Global Internet Penetration Rate and the Digital Gender Divide

This study investigated the possible contributing factors to the digital gender divide and the spatial spillover effects of submarine communication cables on neighboring areas. Using spatial statistical models and global data, this study examined the Internet penetration rate and the digital gender divide in 186 countries. Data sources included open source data, social media, ITU and UNCTAD databases, and the World Bank. The study estimated the average male and female Internet users in 186 countries using Facebook API. The number of submarine communication cables between countries was used as the basis for constructing the spatial weights matrix. The countries with the highest Internet penetration rate were mostly in Europe. Those with the lowest Internet penetration rate were in Africa, Central Asia, and West Asia. Thirteen of the 15 countries with the worst Internet penetration rate were located in the African region. A significant digital gender divide arose in the developing and the least-developed countries. We argue that connectivity is key to the reduction of the digital gender divide and to ensuring that more women have access to the Internet. The study ascertains that the Internet penetration rate is related to the digital gender divide in individual countries and has a spatial spillover impact in surrounding nations connected by submarine communication cables. The study demonstrates that submarine cables serve as important infrastructure for closing the digital gender divide and deserve increased analytical attention.

The Growing Gender Divide: Changing Perceptions of Gender Equality among the Youth in the United States

The Growing Gender Divide: Changing Perceptions of Gender Equality among the Youth in the United States

Navigating Educational Disruptions: The Gender Divide in Parental Involvement and Children's Learning Outcomes

Navigating Educational Disruptions: The Gender Divide in Parental Involvement and Children's Learning Outcomes

Group Lending Models As An Alternative Empowerment Model: Assessing Gendered Socio-Economic Impacts in the Global South

Grameen Banks and other microcredit banks specialised towards collective empowerment in rural Bangladesh. The research reviews case studies alongside open-source data on group lending initiatives and models data on creditworthiness, upward mobility, and financial security of women in Bangladesh to examine the potential for the Grameen Bank’s replication for other marginalised economic groups in countries in the Global South, including India, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka. The study aims to identify successes and failures in building community solidarity, the extent of women’s exclusion from other formal credit institutions, and the psychological well-being of female borrowers. It explores the long-term sustainability of group lending programs in specific Global South economic contexts (with widening income gaps across class and gender divides, and growing polarisation) and assesses their broader economic impacts on community development and growth in the identified countries. The study revealed that high repayment rates and the social dynamics of group lending with female borrowers translate into a sustainable and profitable model for lenders, as well as being an alternative system of empowerment benefiting both borrowers and lenders. The paper will analyse the impact of microfinance in developing economies. How far has this concept enabled women’s empowerment in Bangladesh? Has this resulted in encouraging adequate skills for women in other marginalized sections of these economies? What are the models on which this concept works? How effectively have these been used in other developing economies like Pakistan, Shri Lanka and India? Has the model changed in the country in which this model originated? What are the advantages and disadvantages of this system of microfinancing? These and other similar questions will be addressed in the course of this paper.

Operationalizing competency-based assessment:Contextualizing for cultural and gender divides.

Following current trends, educational institutions often decide to use a competency framework as an overarching structure in their assessment system. Despite the presence of a common understanding of how different examinations can contribute to the decision on attaining a particular competency, a detailed mapping of the data points appears to be a challenging area that remains to be explored. Faced with the newly emerged task of introducing the assessment of the attainment of UAE medical students against the EmiratesMEDs competency framework, Dubai Medical College for Girls (DMCG) attempted to operationalise the designed concept in the assessment system considering the cultural and gender divide. We believe that health professionals who attempt to implement contextualized competency-based assessment could benefit from being acquainted with our experience. The article offers a step-by-step guide on contextualized competency assessment operationalization, describing building the team, working with consultants and faculty development, estimating institutional assessment capacity, mapping and operationalizing the maps by using both human recourses and the software. We also offer the readers the list of enabling factors and introduce the scope of limitations in the process of developing the competency-based assessment system. We believe that following the present guide can allow educators to operationalize competency-based assessment in any context with respect to local culture and traditions.

Time Divide, Gender Divide: Gender, Work, and Family in South Korea

Abstract South Korea is celebrated for its rapid economic growth and development, but gender equity is far out of reach in the South Korean economy: women’s labor force participation remains among the lowest, and the gender gap in pay is among the largest among the advanced industrialized countries. What explains this pervasive and persistent gender disparity? In this introductory essay, the authors argue that the social organization of time—specifically, how time is used and valuated—is an important proximate mechanism that creates and reinforces gender inequality in South Korea. Following the logic of gender, which dictates what women and men should do at work and in the family and how hours spent on these domains are compensated economically and culturally, the time divide takes a deeply gendered form and creates unequal economic outcomes between women and men. The authors also argue that the time divide is more consequential in South Korea, relative to other countries, because two cultural forces—work culture emphasizing long work hours and parenting culture emphasizing gender essentialism—both operate at the highest level. At the end of this essay, the authors put forth ideas about how organizational and institutional policies might help to reform this deeply gendered system.

Gaps in Treatment-Related Fears of Patients With Low-Risk Thyroid Cancer—The Gender Divide

Gaps in Treatment-Related Fears of Patients With Low-Risk Thyroid Cancer—The Gender Divide

Role of Digital Media Self - Efficacy, Gender and Self - Directed Leaning on Cognitive Engagement among Young Adults: A Digital Gender Divide

Role of Digital Media Self - Efficacy, Gender and Self - Directed Leaning on Cognitive Engagement among Young Adults: A Digital Gender Divide

Constructions of Sexual Identities in the Ageing Body: A Qualitative Exploration of Older Norwegian Adults’ Negotiation of Body Image and Sexual Satisfaction

Older adults face age-related changes as well as stigma in relation to their bodies and sexuality, challenging their understanding of themselves as sexual, thought to impact both sexual desire, activity and satisfaction. A qualitative study with a semi-structured interview was completed with 32 people, aged 65–85, to investigate how older people construct understanding of their self as sexual in an ageing body. The analysis generated two main themes; “Positions of the ageing body as sexual”, with three subthemes, and “Negotiating change, transitions in identities”, with two sub themes. Results showed variations in participants’ thoughts about their body and how either appearance, agency or body function influenced different aspects of current sexuality and sexual satisfaction, and understandings of self. Statements showed examples of both internalized ageist understandings of the ageing body as sexual, but also rejections or low relevance of ageist attitudes in the understandings of present body image and sexual satisfaction. Results showed differences in how changes were understood and negotiated either through enhancement strategies or through cognitive-emotional, and social regulation. The findings demonstrated paradoxes and contradictions in the understanding and management of the ageing body and sexual satisfaction, where variations were found along but also across the divides of gender, relationship status and quality, sexual orientation, self-esteem and age cohorts. Implications indicate that health care strategies and policies should understand sexual ageing from a developmental perspective to support individual projects of developing affirmative and adjusted identities as sexual in an ageing body.

Flipped Classroom in Post-Pandemic: Evaluating Gender Divide and Impact on the Student’s Achievement in Mathematics

Flipped classroom in mathematics is gaining momentum even in post-pandemic. This innovative pedagogy is beneficial in delivering mathematics content even when the number of learning sessions is reduced due to the restrictions of holding in-person classes. This study explores the effect of flipping mathematics classroom on the achievement of high school students and if a gender divide exists. One-Group Pre-test and Post-test Design was employed. Fifty-seven (57) Grade 10 students were the respondents of this study of which there were twenty-five (25) male and thirty-two (32) female students. Findings revealed that students improved their scores in the given mathematics assessment after being exposed to the flipped classroom. Consequently, the Mean Percentage Scores increased significantly from Low Mastery to Average Near Mastery. However, no gender divide was found in a flipped classroom. Overall, the flipped classroom can potentially increase students’ achievement in mathematics.

Gender Divide in Irish Potato Production among Farming Households in Uasin-Gishu County, Kenya

Women contribute substantively to the agricultural sector and support food security. However, gender-based differences in terms of control and access to financial and productive resources inhibit their sustainability, resilience, and agricultural productivity. This study investigates the gender-based productivity differences in Irish potato production in Uasin-Gishu County, Kenya, and identifies the factors driving this disparity. This study adopted a cross-sectional field survey and simple random sampling to collect quantitative data from 256 respondents (67 female and 189 male farmers). The Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition model decomposed the gap into the endowment (differences in resource endowments) and structural (differences in return to the endowment factors) effects. Our study finds a production gap of 11% favoring male farmers, with a structural effect (53 %) larger than the endowment effect (33%). This study confirms that a notable number of factors, including land, education, climate-smart technologies, and fertilizer, cause the gap. Therefore, these factors represent the potential intervention areas in any attempt to reduce the gender gap. Policymakers should devise interventions through a gender lens against using a one-fits-all intervention to uplift female farmers from their low productivity traps. Keywords: Oaxaca-Blinder, Female, male, agricultural, farmers, gap DOI: 10.7176/JESD/13-14-04 Publication date: July 31 st 2022

The 2022 South Korean Presidential Election and the Gender Divide among the Youth

The 2022 South Korean presidential election was the country's most closely contested election since a democratic direct electoral system was initiated in 1987, with less than a 1 percent di erence separating the two major candidates among 34 million votes cast. Despite some parallels with and continuities from previous elections, the 2022 election saw new voting alignments emerge based on one topic: gender equality. In this essay, we explain how and why gender became such a prominent issue during the 2022 election campaign, and how this a ected voting patterns, especially among male and female voters in their twenties and thirties. Specifically, we argue that gendered voter behaviour during the election arose from rising anti-feminist sentiments among young men, and that the two main presidential candidates politicized the issue to maximize support from this group. This in turn triggered the consolidation of a young female voting bloc. Using an original survey conducted in January 2022 with an approximate nationally representative sample of 1,017 respondents, we identify two possible causes of rising anti-feminist sentiments among young men: the belief that women receive preferential treatment in employment opportunities and mandatory military service for men. In addition, through an embedded survey experiment run before the election, we proposed that political candidates with pro-gender messages would be less likely to receive support from young men, while candidates with anti-gender messages would be likely to receive more support; these projections were confirmed by the actual voting breakdowns of the recent election. The results suggest that the new administration must handle gender issues with extreme care to ensure that divergent perceptions of the gender divide do not become further polarized over the next few years, since such a development could very well fuel democratic deconsolidation in South Korea.

Canadian Gastroenterology Career Pathway Experiences: Exploring the Gender Divide.

BackgroundWe aimed to determine the persistence of differential career experiences between male and female gastroenterologists in Canada >20 years after they were first noted in the literature.MethodsA 51-question mixed-methods survey was developed focusing on personal, professional and financial characteristics. The survey was disseminated via email and fax to practicing gastroenterologists using provincial college registries and the Canadian Association of Gastroenterology. Numerical data were analyzed using the chi-square test. Qualitative thematic analysis was conducted for short answer responses.FindingsThere were a total of 114 responses (17% response rate) with 35% female respondents. Mean age was 49 years for males and 41 years for females (P = 0.001). Clinical practice types included general GI (63%), urban (82%) and academic (51%). Males reported more endoscopy time (P = 0.001) versus females who spent more time on research (P < 0.001). Men were more likely to be married (P = 0.011), but women were more likely to be responsible for childcare (P = 0.016). Women were more likely to choose between marriage and career and more chose marriage compared to men (P = 0.045). Males earned >$100,000/year higher income than females even when offset by age and work hours (P = 0.048). A salary >$600,000 was reported by 32% of men, compared to 3% of women. Female gastroenterologists reported less mentorship during GI training, challenging relationships with support staff, reduced promotion opportunity, more difficulty publishing and having their competency challenged.InterpretationCompared to previous data, there has not been significant gender-related progress in the past two decades regarding female gastroenterologists’ clinical practices, remuneration and work-life balance.

The Gender Divide in Wikipedia: Quantifying and Assessing the Impact of Two Feminist Interventions

Abstract Wikipedia has a well-known gender divide affecting its biographical content. This bias not only shapes social perceptions of knowledge, but it can also propagate beyond the platform as its contents are leveraged to correct misinformation, train machine-learning tools, and enhance search engine results. What happens when feminist movements intervene to try to close existing gaps? Through a quantitative analysis of over 11,000 Wikipedia articles, we provide an evaluation of two popular feminist interventions designed to counteract gender inequality within digital information projects. We find that the interventions are successful at adding content about women that would otherwise be missing, but they are less successful at addressing structural biases that limit the visibility of that content. This leads us to argue for a more granular and cumulative analysis of gender gaps in collaborative environments. We also discuss the implications for future scholarship on digital inequalities.

Digital Gender Divide and Convergence in the European Union Countries

AbstractThe aim of this study is to examine the digital gender divide in the European Union (EU) countries by applying two widely used indicators: percentage of the population who has used the Internet in the last 3 months (ICT-USE indicator) and percentage of the population who has made an online purchase in the last 3 months (ICT-PURCHASE indicator). With these indicators, the digital gender gaps are shown in absolute and relative terms. In addition, the European convergence beta and sigma, between the years 2007 and 2019, is also analyzed. The results among European countries show that the ICT-USE indicator has a lower dispersion than the ICT-PURCHASE indicator; hence, in general, the digital gender divide or gap is usually lower when ICT-USE is used in comparison with ICT-PURCHASE. The highest values of the digital gender gap in the EU, regardless of the indicator used, are found in Croatia and Italy, reflecting an unfavorable position for women. Ireland is also in this group, but in its case, the results show an unfavorable position for men. Additionally, Cyprus does not register gender differences in either of the two indicators analyzed. Finally, the convergence between European countries is corroborated, both in the indicators analyzed and in the different gender digital gaps built.

Conflagration: How Transcendentalists Sparked the American Struggle for Racial, Gender, and Social Justice

Conflagration: How Transcendentalists Sparked the American Struggle for Racial, Gender, and Social Justice

In-between military and civilian: ongoing conflict, disability, and masculinity

ABSTRACT This article deals with the construction of militarised masculinity of disabled veterans in the interplay of official identity and embodied everyday experience in the context of an ongoing internal armed conflict. It explores a militarised masculinity with shifting meanings and interpretations in response to different phases of the ongoing Kurdish conflict in Turkey, with reference to the everyday, disability, and vulnerability, complicating the boundaries between making and unmaking of militarised masculinity. Drawing on empirical data, this article focuses on two key historical moments to explain the shifting meanings of gendered militarisation – the Kurdish peace process between 2009–2015 and the aftermath of the 15th July 2016 coup attempt. Both moments are significant to explore the militarised masculinity of the disabled veterans as they both appear in veterans’ narratives as moments of loss of masculine privilege, reflecting their shifting relations with the state and broader society. This article explores how instability caused by the transformation of official military identity leads disabled veterans to renegotiate the boundaries along the gender and military-civilian divides in their efforts to reclaim their lost masculine privileges. It also demonstrates how proximity to a particular form of violence becomes significant in reclaiming distinctiveness of their veteran identity.

"Gendercide—Gender Divide": reflections on organising a conference... and then moving it online

This is a personal reflection on the experience of organising, postponing, and then reorganising an international conference online during a pandemic. It considers the very real elements of the external chaos, suffering, and confusion which were held in mind throughout the conference planning and delivery, as we also navigated different time zones and constantly changing advice regarding Covid-19. It is about how we transformed our initial feelings of frustration, disappointment, and loss into the drive to keep as much of our original plan alive, and, in the process, how the first IAFP conference with a large group and live simultaneous translation was created online.

Encouraging Undergraduate Marketing Students to Reflect on Critical Thinking and the Digital Gender Divide.

In today’s society where there is an abundance of accessible, complex, and often false information, critical thinking (CT) is an essential skill so that citizens in general and students in particular can make complex decisions based on scientific evidence, rather than on prejudices, biases, and pre-established beliefs. In this context, the purpose of this study is to discover whether Active Learning (AL) methodology, using different technologies, contributes to improving the CT of the student body, applying it to the Digital Gender Divide (DGD). Three questionnaires were used to collect information, using both a quantitative and a qualitative approach. Open-ended questions are included for fuller answers, which are complemented by content analysis of the recordings and virtual presentations made. The results show that the AL methodology favours the development of CT in the DGD in a remarkable way. Likewise, the various technologies implemented in the methodology (e.g., the Google Applications Site, online round table discussions, role-plays, virtual presentations, and forms) are relevant to improving CT in DGD. It concludes by recommending the implementation of AL with CT as in the one carried out, to help prepare better professionals and raise awareness of how to reduce the DGD.