Are Girls Less Involved with Technology Because Parents Fear
Online Predators? 5.6.10 | In the digital world, two things are
often accepted as fact: 1) boys are more tech savvy than girls;
and 2) the internet is a big scary place from which children
need protection. What is rarely considered, however, is that
there may be a link between the two. It might just be that our
efforts to protect children from online predators are overly
focused on girls, which, in turn, leaves them more shy about
engaging with the digital world in the way boys do. In two
recent studies, Northwestern University communications professor
Eszter Hargittai has found that even when accounting for
“digital literacy,” gender still matters when it comes to
digital prowess. She has found, for example, that young women
share less content (for example, video and music) online than
their male counterparts, and that men consistently perceive
their technical skills to be greater than most women judge their
own to be. The same patterns were borne