Computer self efficacy, computer anxiety, attitudes towards the ...

530 A. Durndell, Z. Haag / Computers in Human Behavior 18 (2002) 521–535analyses, applied to computers, see computing as part of a masculine dominatedtechnology which pays little heed to human values and is often connected to a militaryor aggressive purpose. It could be argued that the Internet can be viewed as anextension of this as opposed to being a medium encouraging human equality, or asWeiser (2000) puts it, much of the research fails to confirm the Internets ‘GreatEqualizer’ metaphor. The Internet’s use as a source of pornography emphasises thislack of equity. Sussman and Tyson (2000), with reference to computer mediatedinteraction, argued that gendered power differentiation in communicative styletranscends the medium. In other words, if gendered power relations exist in theworld, they are to be expected in computer use and Internet use as well.Thus, the results obtained in the current study appear to indicate that the literatureon Internet use and attitudes is liable to follow the existing equivalent literatureon computing, in particular in tending to produce evidence of a gender effect. Theprecise nature of this effect with regard to the Internet, and how it manifests in differentsituations will no doubt be quite complex, as with the computing literature,but this study does provide some evidence of the direction in which it may go.It was indicated in the Introduction that there was some evidence and historybehind the contention that the countries of ex Communist East Europe may notproduce the gender effects with respect to technology that have been frequentlyidentified in the West (Alting & Brand, 1992). On the other hand, as these countriesleave their past behind, it is possible that a side effect could be that they will begin toproduce the technological gender effects of their western mentors. There has beensome argument as to whether the Soviet system really did produce much genderequality. Buckley (1989), for example, used the phrase ‘womens’ double burden’ forthe situation in the USSR where women had to both be responsible for bringing upchildren and going out to work in order to survive. It also may have been the casethat really high status technology in the military industrial complex was primarily inthe hands of men in the Soviet Union. On the other hand, as Durndell et al. (1998)found, when women engineers in Bulgaria were explicitly asked about the largenumber of women engineers to be found in their country, they tended to give creditto the former system, particularly to its achievements in education. The unificationof Germany was a special and extreme case where two states were turned into one,and where relative gender neutrality for technology in the old East Germany rapidlybecame male dominated in the new unified Western dominated state (Nickel, 1993).It may be doubtful that other states will quite follow this pattern with its specialcircumstances. However, Durndell et al. (1997) and Durndell et al. (2000) producedsome evidence that this may be beginning to happen more slowly elsewhere, and theexistence of the significant gender results found in this study in Romania supportsthat point of view.Finally, the reported uses to which the Internet was put by this sample provides apattern not too dissimilar to that found elsewhere (Miller & Durndell, 2001), perhapsrather surprisingly in the light of the relatively poor technological provision inRomania. Table 4 shows that males were on occasions more likely to report usingthe Internet for particular purposes, but that there was also a certain amount ofsimilarity in the uses that males and females reported for the Internet. Males were