Exploring Information Security and Domestic Equality

Abstract

It is well known that men and women differ in terms of security behavior. For instance, studies report that gender plays a role in security non-compliance intentions, malware susceptibility, and security self-efficacy. While one reason for gender-based differences can be that women are vastly underrepresented in the community of security professionals, the impact that gender differences in security behavior have on equality is an underresearched area. This paper argues that cyberinequality can impact domestic inequality and even be an enabler for domestic abuse. This paper intends to shed light on how digitalization works in households in order to problematize around equality in the digital era. It reports on a survey that measures different factors of personal information security and shows that men and women do indeed differ in personal information security behavior on a number of points such as men being more influential when it comes to ICT decisions in the household.