Benefit on the accessibility of the internet to educated women in Malaysia

Low rate of labor force participation among women has always been a focus issue in the development agenda of many countries due to the “absent women” will represent a loss of skills and brain drain from the workforce. This is especially true given the fact that there is a greater number of women enrolled in tertiary education. Low participation rate among highly educated women thus will affect the return on education especially among developing countries. In Malaysia, female participation rate in the labor force remained around 44 to 48 percent within 30 years and employed women is dominated by those with secondary educational attainment while those with tertiary education contributes only 32% to total women participated in the labor market. The main reason for educated women dropping out from labor force is difficulty to balance between career and family lives. When they need to make a choice, women will often prioritize family rather than their career. The emergence of the internet is deemed as a partial solution to this problem. High accessibility to the internet would be able to help manage and balance between family and work. With high accessibility to ICT, women can also work from home or any other location than the office or project site. Therefore, time can be saved and could be manage according to their own time preferences, costs and stress of commuting for employees will be reduced if they could do their job anywhere, including at home. Like many other countries in the world, Malaysians received rapid technological advancement from day to day. In year 2012, 65.8 percent of individuals have access to the internet as compared to 21.4 per cent in year 2000. Thus, to examine benefits that could be obtained by educated women with internet access, a total of 943 women with tertiary education answered the online questionnaire. This study will explore how educated women benefit from internet access at their homes. For those who work, this study will determine how access to the internet could help to balance their responsibilities of career and family life. For those who do not work, the research tries to find out the extent of their confidence in term of how high access to the internet can help them return to work without leaving the care of the household. The findings from this study help us to understand the willingness of women to work and be in the labor market with high internet accessibility.