Nov. 4 (Portaltic/EP) –
More than 30 percent of young people in Spain do not know how to set up digital services or use and customize the tools available to increase privacy and anonymity online.
This is one of the conclusions reached by researchers from the Open University of Catalonia (UOC) in a recent study entitled ‘Digital skills of youth in Spain: an analysis of the gender gap’.
This research has been funded by the Ministry of Science and Innovation and is part of the R&D project Digital social education: youth, active citizenship and inclusion.
In the report, for which 600 young people of both genders, residing in Spain and between the ages of 16 and 18, have been interviewed, the relationship between the level of digital literacy and the perspective of a possible gender gap in education has been analyzed. young population of Spain in the new media context.
In this survey, different capacities have been considered, such as technical skills, that is, the ones that refer to device management and minimum skills to access the digital environment, as well as the information skills. The latter are those relating to the evaluation of the content consumed and online sociability.
Based on these aspects, two types of conclusions have been drawn. The former refer to technical and informational and critical knowledge. On the other hand, there are those that refer to aspects related to equality and the gender gap in terms of self-perception by young people.
“In general terms, in the areas related to competences, both boys and girls are valued similarly. What’s more, in informational skills, such as social skills, the results are slightly favorable for girls”, commented one of the authors of the work and researcher on the doctorate in Humanities and Communication at the UOC, Pedro Gernández de Castro.
In this sense, the data indicates that 71 percent of the young women claim to handle the different profiles of your digital identity, compared to 66 percent of those surveyed. Likewise, only 25 percent of them maintain that they know how to maintain the devices or even know how to repair them.
This is where one of the great differences in gender issues is reflected, since only 18 percent of the girls state that they are aware of it, compared to 32.6 percent of boys. Likewise, the analysis determines that girls perceive themselves as having a higher level of informational and social skills in the digital environment than boys and that boys consider that they have more critical knowledge than girls.
DIGITAL NATIVES WITHOUT DIGITAL SKILLS
Another part of this report refers to the importance of being digital natives, a definition that does not necessarily imply having digital skills. So much so that, based on the survey questions, researchers have determined that more than 30 percent Of the youngs has dysfunctions both technically and informationally.
In the latter, the report indicates that this percentage of young people admits not knowing how to proceed with the configuration of digital services and use tools to increase both your privacy and anonymity ‘online’.
Faced with this scenario, there is a need to open educational spaces in which young people can be accompanied “to encourage this criticism of the digital environment and demystify the idea that they are digital natives and that they will learn what is necessary on their own”, according to Fernandez deCastro.
In this sense, a digital education is proposed that compulsorily incorporates a critical look so that it is not oriented solely to the training of employees who adapt to the needs of the labor market at that time, but also to the creation of a participatory active population with critical capacity.
In relation to the gender gap, from this study it is pointed out that it is necessary to include some of the aspects of the feminist theories in the technological field and implement an education that integrates the diverse perspectives
