Gender and Communication

There is a definite gender bias in the urban survey results in terms of new media and ICT access in urban Colombi(see chart 1). Men are 14 percentage points more likely to have household access to a computer and eight percentage points more likely to have internet connections at home. Interestingly, as can be seen in chart 2 below, home is the top access point for internet for both men and women. Internet cafés are also popular, although more so with men.

Chart 1

Chart 2

• With mobile phone access as well, men seem slightly advantaged-they are six percentage points more likely to have access to one. With newer ICTs such as MP3s, Blackberry phones and i-Phones, men seem to have slightly greater access.
• Television access is near universal for men and women, and they also seem equally likely to have household access to satellite dishes and cable connections.

Chart 3

• Interestingly, almost all male and female respondents who said they use the internet for general purposes also said they rely on the web for weekly news (see chart 3 and 4). However, men are generally more likely to use their mobile phones and the internet than women.
• A significant percentage of men and women use their mobile phones (86 percent men versus 76 percent women in chart 3), although fewer than 30 percent of men and women use SMS as a means of accessing news weekly.
• In general, television and radio are the main weekly media sources for men and women in urban Colombia. Both men and women use it equally. They are also equally likely to be using tv and radio as sources of news on a weekly basis.

Chart 4

New Media and Communications 

• Sending and receiving emails led the list of online activities for both men and women asked about in the survey, followed by resarching specific topics.
• For all other activities shown in Chart 5, men seem to be more prolific users than women, particularly in accessing YouTube videos, playing games, downloading music and listening to podcasts.

Chart 5

• Men are also more likely to use web 2.0 activities such as blogging and social networking, while the use of financial activities was nearly equal.

Chart 6

• Of those who said they visited social networking websites in the past month, both men and women used them for chatting, sharing photos and videos, and writing on walls. Men were more likely than women to use these websites for playing games (see chart 7).

Chart 7

• As can be seen in table 1 above, there is a gender divide-men were more likely to use all of the most popular websites among urban Colombians, especially social networking websites such as Facebook and Hi5 (a popular social networking website in Latin America) are frequented by men far more than women. Another important gender distinction is observed with YouTube visitors (see table 1).
• Of those men and women who had used blogs (read or post comments on) in at least the previous month, women were more likely to access personal and entertainment blogs, whereas men were more interested in technology and news (see chart 8).

Chart 8

• There is a definite gender divide in weekly mobile phone use in urban Colombia. Men in the survey were more likely than women to take photos, listen to music or the radio, and play games (see chart 9 and 10).

Chart 9

Chart 10

Traditional Media Activities

Chart 11

• Men were twice as likely to access the radio on the internet.
• Men reported higher viewership of international channels. Of special mention are channels such as CNN (Spanish), Fox and Discovery channel, which seemed to be more popular with men in urban Colombia.

Chart 12