This morning's RSS feeds have brought another round of the ages old, "Why aren't there more women bloggers?" debate. *sigh* I really wonder when these guys will get it folks. The blogosphere is dominated by women, and rightly so, women have been the daily writers of the world for generations...diaries, letters, post cards, newsletters, greeting cards, etc. Blogging is an extension of those earlier forms of daily writing. Where women are not the primary gender blogging about a topic is in the fairly narrow genre of "political blogs." Sadly this is the only category that members of the media seem to think of as blogs, so from their perspective there are not many women bloggers.

My colleague David Brake at Media @ lse first alerted me that the discussion was open again with his post, Why is the [political] blogosphere dominated by white males? David has taken a sociological view, in his short post, on why there are few women writing in the political blog genre. I should note here that David is commenting on Steven Levy's Blogging Beyond the Men's Club. I actually emailed Levy about this article when it came out, using only political blogs and one blogging conference to gage the female contingent of an entire online process seems pretty skewed to me.

From Media @ LSE:

Finally someone from the mainstream media (Steven Levy) asks this obvious question. He gets part of the answer - bloggers tend to link to people like themselves - but tacitly assumes that there are a large number of (for example) black women blogging about the same kinds of things that the leading (white male) bloggers are and being excluded.

This misses the wider point that sociologists like Bourdieu have explored - that many people - particularly those of lower social status or women - may simply never think of political discussion as something 'for them' either because they don€™t see politics as relevant to them or because they feel their opinions would not be listened to.

Well I can't speak for all women or even most of them, but I can do a little autoethnography and speak for myself. I don't blog about politics because the daily ins and outs of it are boring to me now. I didn't wake up one day and decide that this was true from hence forth, rather I was politically active for many years - working on and running campaigns for local and regional leaders - and as is want to happen it wears you down. I am still well connected and can pickup the phone and have my calls answered by a variety of political leaders at different levels of government. I exercise that power judiciously on issues that are very important to me.

Like most bloggers I write about what interests me on a daily basis. Sometimes that is politics, more often it is other things. I do not feel disenfranchised rather I just know from experience that the daily goings ons of politics are all consuming and best left to those who feel the fire.

In his post David points to A-list blogger Jeff Jarvis at BuzzMachine and his post Blogging white male. Jarvis, an excellent example of having the "fire" I referred to above.  Jarvis seems to be taking Levy's comments a bit too personally throughout most of the post; as though Levy was advising that white male bloggers be expunged, "Off with their heads!", which by my read he is not. The post is long and rambling and somewhat incoherent in places but there are a few points I think should receive comment.

Third, anyone can blog. Anyone. If you're not white or not male or not American or not powerful or not rich or not anything, you can still blog. This is not like Big Media, where there's a gate to keep and a ceiling to hit. This is a wide-open medium where anyone can blog. This old quota talk is outmoded and irrelevant. Hell, people in Iran can blog -- a heckuva lot of them women, by the way. People in Afghanistan and Iraq and Lebanon and Bahrain can blog even though there are efforts in all those places to stop them. But nobody's stopping anybody here from blogging. So if you don't think there are enough unmale or unwhite or unanything people blogging, go convince some of them to go to Blogger and sign up! It's that easy.

Jarvis' comment is accurate but naive. Check out the statistics on internet access. Access like blogging is the province of the "have's," at home and internationally, with the less-than-have's being limited to ways that most of us with multiple personal access points - home, work, school, desktop, pc, wired, and wireless - would find hard to deal with. If you have questions about this checkout your local public library or internet cafe, the lines are long to use the available computers. Of course I should mention that access to free blog hosting sites helps to bridge the gap but only after the writer has access to the medium as a whole.

I probably should mention here that recent studies have show that 70% of the worlds poor are female. Often they are women with children. So women are disproportionately likely to have problems accessing any point of the online medium, not just blogging.

Fourth, in the blogosphere, nobody knows you're a dog... or unmale... or unwhite. There are plenty of bloggers I read who are demographic mysteries to me. I honestly don't know the race or gender of many bloggers and commenters I read and -- listen carefully now -- I don't care. When I was raised in this country, we were taught that it was a goal of our culture -- melting-pot nirvana -- to get to the point where race and gender didn't matter. Well, we've finally created a medium where that's possible. But now we're trying to make race and gender matter again. How crazy is that? That is, to paraphrase my West Virginia father [you see, I'm hillbilly, actually], bassackwards.

PLEASE! Will this idea never die. *sigh* Language not ungendered. If you don't know the gender of the person whose writing you are reading, then they are almost always male or, if female, they are writers who use highly masculinized writing styles often learned through socialization into highly masculine fields...like academics and technology and journalism. If you don't believe me check out the Gender Genie, it is a linguistics site that can fairly accurately show the gender of the writer of a piece of text. There are exceptions, my personal writing is always listed as male though my blog entries are more female then my academic writing. Why does this happen? For much the same reason that this debate persists. After 25 years of schooling I have succumbed to the dominate writing style of the people who have taught me, the "right" style I'm sure many of them would say. So my writing is more masculine then I am personally...this writer is 100% girl.

Fifth, don't judge the blogosphere only by 100 blogs on top of some list. That's so old media. There are eight million blogs -- and 7,999,900 of them that get more traffic and more links and more interest than those mere 100. Judge their diversity.

SO SO TRUE! It's been amazing to me that the media eschews diary blogs as trivial and boring, until there is some reason to elevate them because of their informal discussions of daily happenings in hot spots or problem areas around the world. Salam Pax did not start out as a political blog, rather it was a politically conscious diary blog that often commented about the people and places the author visited during his daily movements. The diary only became the darling of the political in-crowd after "the places" he visited became part of an impending war zone. Likewise diary blogs have been temporarily elevated to the heights of the blogosphere when they have included among their daily writings references to news making events - the bombings in Madrid, the tsunami, etc. These blogs remain at their heart diaries, dairies that can now add a section about their experiences as media darlings until their 15 minutes is expended and they return to their regular entries.

What is interesting to think about is even in these ad hoc elevations of diaries to news, the bloggers are usually males, and often are white. Is that because women are not writing about their experiences in these disasters? Possibly. Maybe they are out working to help the people impacted rather then sitting behind a computer writing. Maybe they are so devastated by the horrors they have experienced that words fail them. I can understand that, it took me three years to write about 9/11 and I don' think I will ever be able to do so dispassionately. And maybe, just maybe they see disasters as local tragedies and not the fodder for international observation. Or, as is most likely, the blogs chosen are by male writers because they are "good" writing which means masculine writing.

The only thing I know for sure here is that there are far more female bloggers online then males. I sincerely hope that someday the media opens their eyes and realizes that their own gender biases keep them from seeing the flood that is around them...there are women everywhere.

Posted by prolurkr at March 17, 2005 10:56 AM

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