Gender Gap in the Usage of Mobile Phone as Digital Multimedia Device: The Case of South Korea

This research attempts to look at the extent and degree of the gender gap in the mobile phone usage and its social meanings for the users, as the mobile phone has become widely incorporated into everyday lives of users. This research conducted a survey of 456 mobile phone users in the Seoul metropolitan area, and found several statistically significant differences between men and women in different age groups in terms of their mobile phone usage and their adoptability of various multimedia functions of the mobile phone. Contrary to the stereotypical passivity in women’s utilization of new media technologies, the results of this research show that women are more active than men in adopting multimedia functions of the mobile phone and have stronger willingness to adopt such functions in the future. The traditional assumption of gender gap in the adoption of new media technologies needs to be reexamined.

Publisher: Paper presented at the annual meeting of the International Communication Association, TBA, San Francisco, CA, May 23, 2007
Year of Publication: 2007