Gender and Digital Teaching Competence in Dual Vocational Education and Training

Abstract

In recent decades, technological advances have been revolutionizing all areas of society, including the teaching resources and methodologies used in the world of education. Teachers are in the process of adapting to develop the digital skills they need for the use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs), a process that must be permanent and in which there are still knowledge gaps undermining its application. This study aims to determine whether this lack of digital skills is influenced by the gender of teachers, for example, whether there is a gender gap in ICT application in teaching, specifically Dual Vocational Education and Training, which is a teaching area that has been growing exponentially in recent years. A descriptive quantitative method has been used for this study with a sample of 1568 teachers of Dual Vocational Education and Training from the Autonomous Community of Andalusia, with data collected through a questionnaire. The results show that while the level of knowledge of ICT resources is medium among this group and is therefore improvable, there are no significant gender differences between teachers with respect to the application of e-skills by teaching professionals, despite the existence in other contexts of a large digital gender gap in new technology professionals.