Gender Differences in Information Technology Acceptance

Abstract

Gender differences in computer use has been always a topic of research interest. The understanding of the patterns among gender, including beliefs, intention and use behavior of IT/IS would provide us a better picture to the process of design and implementation, which gives support to IT/IS success. However, published works explaining why and how beliefs and attitudes varied between different genders are still scarce, yet the topic was of widespread relevance. We direct our empirical work on user’s beliefs, intention and usage behavior. Gender differences in beliefs would likely make a corresponding impact on the intention to use or not to use computer in the future, and hence, the actual usage pattern. Assumed to be behavioral manifestations of users’ gender differences, we infer these gender differences in the beliefs of computer use from their self-reported intention and usage behavior. Therefore, we aim to explore the factors affecting the intention and usage behavior; and their corresponding strengths in affecting the intention and usage behavior; in order to suggest effective implementation strategies accordingly. The research questions of this empirical study are: 1. What are the emergent constructs that drive the intention and usage behavior of computer use? 2. Do users’ beliefs regarding IT/IS usage differ among genders? 3. To what extent do these effects differ? To address these research questions, we applied technology acceptance model (TAM) to a group of pre-service teachers, and measured their beliefs in using computer to explain the gender differences in their beliefs, intention, and usage of computer. The rest of the article proceeds as follows. The next section starts with a review on gender and technology. The third section explains the model framework TAM. The fourth section describes the instrument construction and validation. The fifth section reports the model testing results. The final section discusses the thrusts of the study and future trends.