2000, when women surpassed men to become a majority of the United States online population, many people also believed the sex digital divide had disappeared. If there were more women than men using the Internet, the logic went, equality had been achieved. Girls and women were equally likely to use computers and the Internet as boys and men.
Still, though the fact that more girls and women were using the Internet is a meaningful step forward, a broader and deeper look at their position in relation to the increasingly techno-centric society and global economy, reveals that equality in access is considerably different from equity in opportunity. In fact, most of the sex and gender inequities in society and other media are replicated online. The ever-present and ever-growing Internet pornography industry, along with the threat of cyber-stalking and the relative ease with which potential sexual predators can attain personal information about women online, make the Internet a hostile--and potentially dangerous--environment for many girls and women. Equally hostile to women are academic and professional pursuits of mathematics, sciences, engineering, computer sciences--all traditionally male fields that are closely linked with computers and the Internet. Research shows how women and girls are systematically steered away from these fields beginning as early as elementary school through school culture, classroom climate, traditional gender roles, and other societal pressures. Additionally, video games, largely marketed for men and boys, often depict girls and women as damsels in distress or sideshow prostitutes. Even those games, such as Tomb Raider, that challenge these stereotypical roles by casting strong, independent, heroic female characters in lead roles dress these big-breasted women with impossibly-dimensioned bodies in tight, revealing clothes. Most video game makers are men and most video game consumers are boys and men. So, instead of critiquing this fact and considering why it is so, the producers bow to market pressures and recycle the industry sexism. Unfortunately, a majority of information technology professionals cite video games as their initial point of interest in the field.
As a result of these and other socio-political, socio-historical, and socio-cultural dynamics, during the same year that women became over 50 percent of the online population, only 7 percent of all Bachelor's-level engineering degrees were conferred to women and only 20 percent of all information technology professionals were women. So, while equality in access rates reflects an important step forward, it does not, by any useful measurement, signify the end of the sex digital divide. In fact, the glaring inequities that remain despite equality in Internet access illustrate the urgency for a deeper, broader understanding of the digital divide and a deeper, broader approach for eliminating it.
These remaining inequities, which mirror deeply entrenched and historically cycled inequities in professional, economic, and education opportunities for women in the U.S., together serve as a clear, powerful critique of the unidimensional approach most often employed for addressing the race and class digital divides: simply providing schools and communities with more computers and more, or faster, Internet access. Again, though this is a positive step forward, it fails to address social, cultural, and political factors that will be in place with or without more machinery. For example, research indicates that, while teachers in schools with a high percentage of White students and a low percentage of students on free or reduced lunch programs are more likely to use these technologies to engage students in creative and critical thinking activities, teachers in schools with a high percentage of Students of Color and a high percentage of students on free or reduced lunch tend to use computers and the Internet for a skills and drills approach to learning. Additionally, the growing online presence of African Americans and Latina(o)s is tempered by the growing