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Top1. Introduction
Use of Information and Communications Technologies (ICT) by governments and public administrations contributes to the development of a profound institutional change: from the public management perspective, by improving its efficiency; and from a political perspective, by fostering citizen participation. ICT can be used to build new venues for citizen participation and offers the potential to bring on government processes that are increasingly transparent and receptive to citizen opinion. The interaction between the administration and society aims to redefine the terms according to which the administration relates to citizens. Increased ICT use could aid in improving public services, but in many cases administrations do little more than publish their information online; the next step is to use technology to change their internal processes and develop collaboration between different institutions (Beynon-Davies & Martin, 2004; Ford & Murphy, 2008).
The term “e-Government” has been coined to capture this entire potential for change and to depict the most ambitious dimension of ICT's contribution to all levels of public administration. Electronic government refers to governments' use of technology, particularly Internet-based applications, to enhance access to and delivery of government information and service to citizens, business partners, employees, other agencies, and government entities. It has the potential to help build better relationships between government and the public by making interaction with citizens smoother, easier, and more efficient (Layne & Lee, 2001). In other cases, it is defined as a new way of organizing public management to increase its efficiency, transparency, accessibility, and its ability to provide proper responses to citizens with intensive and strategic use of ICT, both in the internal management of the public sector and in its everyday exchanges with citizens and public service users. According to this point of view, intensive ICT adoption offers a particular way of structuring management in public entities aimed at improving both public service and internal operations (Rivera, 2006). Successful e-Government initiatives are not simply technological innovations, but rather processes that involve rethinking and redesigning the entire way in which governments operate (Schaupp et al., 2010).
E-Government has become an essential strategy for many governments in their efforts to increase accessibility and facilitate improved diffusion of public sector services. It is important to bear in mind that the success of e-Government initiatives can be determined by contextual factors associated with the demand for electronic services and by the organizational structures and processes that characterize the administrations in charge of technology maintenance (Luna-Reyes, Hernández García, & Gil-García, 2009). The rapid uptake of new technologies is occurring among most groups of citizens, regardless of income, education, age, and gender. Nonetheless, noticeable gaps still exist between different levels of these attributes. Citizens' adoption of online public services has been obstructed by factors such as, digital divide, accessibility, and lack of trust (Akman, Yazici, Mishra, & Arifoglu, 2005; Al-Sobhi, Weerakkody, & El-Haddadeh, 2012).
In Western literature, the digital divide has been an important academic and policy concern over the last two decades. While the first generation of studies of the digital divide focused on internet access, more recent research has considered the importance of the skills and usage gaps (Polat, 2012). Although there is also a significant gap between genders in internet usage, most of e-Government initiatives have been implemented without taking into account the potential gender-based differences in technology usage behavior (Sarabdeen, & Rodrigues, 2010).