Here’s a categorization of blogs from a ComScore report on blogosphere behavior:
- Politics/News
- Hipster
- Tech
- Women (Authored)
- Media
- Personal
What?!? Why would blogs written by women be categorized by characteristics of their authors rather than by what subject they write about? Shouldn’t Michelle Malkin’s blog be categorized under Politics/News? Isn’t Dooce the best example of personal blogging there is? ComScore says their categorization is not exclusive. For example, Wonkette appears in both Politics/News and Women (Authored). But what purpose is served by calling out author gender? It just reinforces the idea that we women are curious trespassers on a ship all filled with men.
The report forms the basis of Idil Cakim’s “A Blog of Her Own”, an article that tiredly proposes that women are not blogging in great numbers (via Elisa Camahort). Elisa points out that Cakim misread the report in concluding that “women blogs constitute 8 percent of the standalone blogs.” In the report, the ComScore researchers identified 400 “popular” blogs then categorized them with their non-exclusive categories. They studied the blogs’ visitor behavior using their panel of 1.5 million U.S. Internet users.The 8% that ComScore reported was for the share of traffic received by blogs categorized as being written by women, not for the number of blogs authored by women. Even if it were the statistic Cakim thought it was, you can’t generalize from the “top” 400 blogs to the entire landscape of weblogs. I’ll have more to say about how ComScore chose their list of blogs in a later post.
At what point will men stop asking “where are the women in the blogosphere?” We are everywhere: writing about politics, about tech, about feminism, about new media, about motherhood, about economics, about academics, about everything that men blog about. According to the recent Pew report on Internet usage, there are more women online than men, not by percentage but in absolute numbers. The same report found that 11% of men compared to 8% of women online report having created a blog. For hosted blogs, a Perseus survey circa 2003 found women more likely to create blogs than men. Even if men may be more likely to host their own blogs, the evidence suggests that number of women blogging is at least of the same order of magnitude as the number of men blogging.
I’ve begun collecting examples from the “where are the women” genre with my del.icio.us tag wherearethewomen. Here’s my list so far of articles that either ask the question or point to people who ask it.
- Stop design - Who/Where are the Women?
- Susan Mernit - SFWeekly writer profiles The Listman
- Performancing.com - Where are the Women in professional blogging?
- Althouse - Where are the women lawprof bloggers?
- Kevin Drum - Where are the women political bloggers?
If you are aware of other examples, leave me a comment or email anne.zelenka at gmail or post on your own blog.
UPDATE: Here’s CultureCat’s list of posts about gender and blogging going back to 2002.
10 Comments
I’ve often wondered about this too and have been considering the question, “what if the majority of webpages had been designed by women, rather than men”. Would anything be different?
Rachel, in that situation maybe web design and web pages would be seen as something trivial and unimportant.
Did you see Dr. Free-ride’s where are the women science bloggers?
Thanks for the shoutout btw.
sciencewoman, thanks for the great link! I’ll add it to my collection.
I started a tag based attention stream on gender, race, class and other power dynamics in the web2.0 world awhile ago: http://marshallk.com/inequities-in-web-20-lets-tag-about-it
Hasn’t picked up too much steam yet, but I’ll tag this into it.
See also the speakers wiki started by Mary Hoder to centralize info about women available to speak on various issues.
https://www.socialtext.net/speakers/index.cgi
Thanks Marshall, I’ll check those things out. Also saw lots more interesting reading on your blog.
Nice post, Anne. Glad I found your blog; I’ve got you in my RSS reader now.
I think a tendency to underestimate the number of women bloggers could arise from the frequent assumption that anonymous bloggers are male.
I have posted to a few blogs using only a gender-neutral username. I bet people assumed I was a bloke unless some particular piece of content indicated otherwise.
Hi Amy, thanks for stopping by. I have wondered what it would be like to blog as a guy or at least with a gender-neutral user name. Haven’t tried it yet though. I think you’re right that there is a tendency to assume bloggers are male, especially in domains like tech.
I am sorry for the late response, but I just would like to clarify that my goal in writing about women and blogging was to show that an opportunity exists for us to use this tool to establish our social agenda and to drum up change. The way I interpret the 8% number was to say: look we have our own category. (OK, you knew that as a female blogger, but not everyone is in the same realm)I then continued with my thoughts on how this number seems actually too small and that there must be more activity around women’s blogging content. And if not, there could be more activity around blogs that matter to women. The Internet is a new platform, we do not have to go through so many barriers to raise our voice. As a woman with two blogs, I sincerely believe in this.