No time or tech for online news: How social and digital inequalities contribute to gender gaps in online news consumption

Despite the proliferation and accessibility of online news, gaps in news use between women and men have endured. We interrogate the unequal relationship between gender and news consumption by closely examining several sociological indicators of inequality that adversely impact women. Combining survey data with passive tracking of web browser and mobile app use in the UK and Brazil, we analyze how digital literacy, issues with technology, personal economic insecurity, and time spent caring for dependents (each unequally distributed across genders) shape patterns of news use differently among men and women. We find that, in our sample, women spend significantly less time with news and selectively avoid news more, and that these relationships are partially mediated by our social inequality indicators, providing some explanation as to why women consume less news. Our findings have implications for the scholarly understandings of gendered social inequalities and for the wider news community, as they highlight how structural issues play a role in gender imbalanced news consumption and avoidance.