Diversity, equity, and inclusion in the digital age : challenges and opportunities

Abstract

This thesis presents two essays about diversity, equity, and inclusion in information systems. In the first essay, we focus on a type of health information technology, healthcare information exchange (HIE), which enables healthcare providers to access and share patients' medical information, improving the quality-of-care delivery across hospitals. While HIE is touted as a potential solution to address geospatial disparities in healthcare, its impact on reducing disparity between urban and rural hospitals remains unclear. Using data envelopment analysis to construct health professionals' productivity measure and applying the difference-in-differences approach, we find that hospitals that have adopted HIE experience a significant increase in health professionals' productivity. However, this effect is more pronounced in urban hospitals than in tural hospitals. We attribute this result to urban healthcare professionals having more significant information needs and higher IT capabilities than health professionals in rural hospitals. The findings suggest that HIE might possibly enlarge the productivity gap between rural and urban health professionals, rather than mitigating the disparity between local and rural hospitals. In the second essay, we examine another type of inequality, gender inequality in the IT workplace. This study offers a new perspective on identifying the role of compensation in addressing gender inequality among women IT professionals and mitigating the negative consequences associated with it. We leverage an extensive dataset of women IT professionals in India across three years. The results demonstrate that compensation plays a significant moderating role by positively influencing pay satisfaction in the presence of gender inequality and negatively impacting turnover intentions. This suggests that adequate financial compensation has the potential to alleviate gender disparities and contribute to higher employee retention rates. These findings make important contributions to the existing literature on IT labor in emerging economies and offer valuable insights for firms seeking to develop effective compensation strategies to retain their IT professionals.

Date of Award	2024
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology
Supervisor	Dongwon LEE (Supervisor) & Kai Lung HUI (Supervisor)