"Gender inequalities overlay themselves onto new technologies quickly, so we cannot ignore them"

Depending on how they are used, they can be either. Distance education has always been attractive to women as a form of study. This is because it has offered flexibility, allowing women to study alongside the other demands of their lives, such as employment and housework. The demands on women often keep them at home, so technologies that help them study from there give them access to learning. Traditional print, mass media, telephone and postal service technologies have been used in distance education very successfully around the world for the last 50 years. When ICTs are introduced in learning, they help with things like reducing the sense of isolation experienced by some women. However, in general, and in all countries where it has been measured, women have less access to ICT equipment and support than men. In addition, they are less confident about using technology, so they tend to use ICTs less than men.

In households where there is only one computer, priority for use is usually given to the husband or father or the children and only secondarily to the mother or wife. The children's use for study is likely to take priority over the mother's. If there is more than one machine in the house, the woman will often inherit the older equipment.

Yes. There is about 20 years of research on computer confidence among school children and students. Researchers have consistently found that girls feel less confident using ICTs than boys, even when their skill levels are measured and found to be the same. We did some research in the UK and China some years ago, and we found this to be the case for both Chinese and UK university students, even though each nationality had a different skill set as a result of the different computer skills taught in the school curriculums of each country. Female students had less confidence in their skills than male students from the same country.

Surveys of use show that there is gender gap in use for everyday applications. For example, a 2009 Eurostat survey asked women and men if they used email, read newspapers and magazines online, did Internet banking or looked for new jobs online. In almost all EU countries, more men did these activities than women, except for job searching.

It is quite similar in a number of areas. The technologies are often different - for example, cheaper mobile technologies or shared equipment may be used - but gender inequalities will play out in ICT access and use unless they are challenged through particular policies and projects. For example, the use of mobile phones given to women to stimulate micro business has been very successful in many ways, but a World Bank paper from 2009 reported how in some countries gender issues were raised by women's use of mobile phones. For instance, husbands became jealous and suspicious of whom their wives were communicating with and demanded to inspect all their calls. You can imagine how this can be a problem in education.

Yes, and that is another area that interests me a lot. In universities, we now see learners as knowledge creators, and we encourage them to use tools such as blogs and wikis to publish content. However, if we look at content on the web, when we can identify expert authors, they are more often men than women, especially when their expertise is about the Internet itself. In March this year, the Pew Research Center carried out a Delphi survey with nearly 1,000 Internet experts, including many representing a large number of US universities. These experts were presented with various statements predicting the future impact of the Internet on all major social institutions. One interesting aspect of the survey is the lack of gender analysis with regard to the respondents and the issues. The report does not give a gender breakdown of the respondents, although it does offer an analysis of the institutions they came from and the length of time they have been Internet users. However, you can still get a sense of the masculine nature of expertise in the field of Internet from the document?s introduction, where 33 names of experts are listed to give a sense of the range and authority of the expertise being drawn on: only five (that is, 15%) of these experts were women.

Blogging is particularly interesting, because it is one of the few areas of Web 2.0 content creation that have been argued to be especially accessible to women's working and writing styles. Journal writing has been described as a women's genre, in contrast to scientific writing, which, along with other aspects of scientific practice, has been classified as a masculine genre, that is, one traditionally produced by men and associated with rationality and objectivity rather than reflection. Can blogging provide the tool for producing what Helene Cixous called "écriture feminine": an act of writing that creates not only new knowledge about gender but a new understanding of "feminine", a new way of using language to create a different knowledge about the world? Researchers have carried out a textual analysis of some thousands of blogs using an automated tool called Gender Genie, which classifies texts as "masculine" or "feminine" depending on different style features. Text classified as being feminine in style was seen to be more interactive, while text classified as masculine was seen as more informative. Female bloggers demonstrated styles that suggested they were more interpersonally involved with their content and readers, while male bloggers used a more informative style and often created what are called "aggregator blogs", that is, blogs that use RSS feeds from other sites and function as a portal for selective sites. Despite these possibilities for women to create knowledge through blogs using a genre that they may find more comfortable than others, most A-list blogs in the Technorati Top 100 are still male. If the Web follows the Pareto principal (i.e., 20% of sites get 80% of hits), and the 20% making up the most popular sites are written by men, then we have a world of online knowledge created by one gender ? probably by one main culture and one language group, too.

Unfortunately, in many developed countries fewer women are studying to become ICT professionals than in the past. Women make up a small proportion of graduates in computer science and ICT degrees. In the UK, between 2004 and 2008, the number of women graduating with computer science degrees fell from 26,700 to 14,700, while the proportion of all ICT grads who were women fell from 23.8% to 19.4%. In 2008, women made up only 14.4% of all UK ICT professionals. ICTs remain one of the most male-dominated fields. At both the user and producer level, men are more active with ICTs than women. This is what we have to keep in mind when we incorporate ICTs into our education systems. Gender differences and gender inequalities are very hard to challenge and start to overlay themselves onto new technologies and systems very quickly, so we cannot ignore them.