Digital text has become the dominant medium for participation in higher education. Yet little is known about the consequences from the shift to digital text usage on the academic reading practices of specific groups of students. Using a unique data set of higher education students, we analyse differences in digital reading skills, practices, perception, and experience for female students and male students. Then we explain these differences by social inequality related to gendered reading practices and artifacts and reveal that the digitisation of academic reading is reproducing gender inequality in higher education.