Regular blog readers are familiar with the rule of thumb that every three months or so there will be another outbreak of blog posts wondering where all the women are. Clancy at Culture Cat provides and extensive list of links to discussions of this question up to March 2005; I’m not sure this data supports the hypothesis of a three month period for the cycle, but then again, Clancy acknowledges that the list is not complete. The point is, the issue seems to come up a lot.
There have been numerous hypotheses floated to explain the apparent absence of women bloggers (in terms of “visibility” if not actual numbers among the population that blogs). Some of these have been plausible, while others have … well, let’s say they’ve inspired some righteously indignant responses from a number of women who blog. Believe it or not, there have even been some explanations based on research (whoa!). For example, Women and Children Last: The Discursive Construction of Weblogs. Here’s a quick overview from their introduction:
An initial consideration of the demographics of blog authors reveals an apparent paradox. Quantitative studies report as many (or more, depending on what one counts as a blog) female as male blog authors, and as many (or more) young people as adults (Henning, 2003; Orlowski, 2003), suggesting a diverse population of bloggers as regards gender and age representation. At the same time, as will be shown, contemporary discourses about weblogs, such as those propagated through the mainstream media, in scholarly communication, and in weblogs themselves, tend to disproportionately feature adult, male bloggers. This inconsistency led us to ask: what are the actual demographics of blog authors, determined according to what criteria? If significant numbers of female and teen bloggers exist, how can their relative absence from public discourses about weblogs be explained?
In this essay, we draw on methods of content analysis to establish both sides of the paradox, and advance an explanation for it. Specifically, we propose that the apparent gender and age bias in contemporary discourses about weblogs arises in part as a result of focus on a particular blog type, the so-called “filter” blog, which is produced mostly by adult males. We argue that by privileging filter blogs and thereby implicitly evaluating the activities of adult males as more interesting, important and/or newsworthy than those of other blog authors, public discourses about weblogs marginalize the activities of women and teen bloggers, thereby indirectly reproducing societal sexism and ageism, and misrepresenting the fundamental nature of the weblog phenomenon. We conclude by advocating a broader characterization of weblogs that takes into account the activities of a majority of blog authors, and more research on weblogs produced by women and teens.
In a nutshell: The blogs that get most of the fanfare (whether by way of media attention or links from “A-list” bloggers) are “filter” type blogs — blogs that focus on world events, online happenings, and such, and that typically include lots of links. Less attention is paid to “journal” type blogs or “k(nowledge)-log” type blogs. The gender distribution is such that more of the “filter” bloggers are male than female. (It turns out that the “journal” is the most common type of blog with female and male bloggers.) Ways blog authors contribute to entrenching the hierarchies among bloggers, yadda yadda.
What caught my eye in this article, however, was that of the (admittedly small) number of k-logs in the study, not one of them was authored by a woman.
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