Internet Usage Pattern by Female Students: A Case Study

Female students are in minority in most of technical institutions in India and many infrastructural facilities and services are not targeted to them. Even though Internet facilitates removal of geographical, social and cultural barriers, it does not seem to have any significant impact on academic pursuit of female students. Not many serious investigations have been conducted to study the usage pattern of internet by female students and its impact on their academic and social activities. This paper presents results of a study conducted at Motilal Nehru National Institute of Technology Allahabad regarding usage pattern of internet facilities by female students. This study has been done by mining the log files of proxy server for three months. This period included two test and one semester examination weeks. Results of mining are summarized below: 1.Approximately 3000 websites were visited and majority of them were non-academic websites. A classification schema for those websites is proposed. 2. Only 13% of internet users are female students and out of which only 11% use internet. 3. Dominant use (63%) of the Internet is for Non- Academic purposes. This is true for students with excellent academic performance(CPI).