Gender and Blogging

I think there may be something rather depressing lurking in the background of this issue. I had the same thought during the kerfuffle about Prospect’s list of intellectuals and how few women there were on it. The ‘correct the balance’ list that someone did (the Guardian, wasn’t it?) filled it out, in fact padded it, with a whole lot of women who weren’t (aren’t) intellectuals at all, but publicists, pop singers, advertisers, that sort of thing. (Which is not, before anyone calls me an elitist, to say that those are worse or inferior things to be, just that that’s not what the list was a list of.) I had to wonder if that might be because there just weren’t enough (or ‘enough’) female intellectuals. Same with this. Maybe there just aren’t ‘enough’ – enough to make up the numbers that are under discussion, that is.

That thought gets me down. Kind of in the same way that a glance at the magazine section at Barnes and Noble does. It has a ‘women’s interest’ section. What’s in it? Bridal mags, wedding mags, be pretty mags.

So if it’s true that there aren’t ‘enough’ women – why don’t more women want to talk about things other than the ‘work/family divide’ and similar? I don’t know. But I wish more did.

… it’s also the case that many of the political concerns of women are not well-addressed in mainstream political commentary, or are simply not thought to be political issues at all (e.g., “work/family choices”).

I note the passive — “not thought to be” — and would add that the missing subject here could be “men” or “women”.

“So if it’s true that there aren’t ‘enough’ women – why don’t more women want to talk about things other than the ‘work/family divide’ and similar? I don’t know. But I wish more did.”

I think your question supplies its own answer. Not the only answer, to be sure, but one important answer. I wish there were more women, too. I’m convinced there won’t be more or enough or whatever until we resolve the problem of the work/family divide.

why don’t more women want to talk about things other than the ‘work/family divide’ and similar?

I’ll take a big swinging guess at that, but first a caveat: bear in mind I’m a biologist not a sociologist/anthropologist/anyone with any kind of professional clue about such phenomena.

That said: Forces like the pay gap, glass ceiling, old boys’ club and so on are still alive and, if not exactly well, not likely to die anytime soon either. Social ideas about gender roles still seem to look backwards as much as they do forwards: the perception that “women keep house and men work” is alive and well, in various forms. So my guess is that there are simply far more women than men whose job is to run the household, and whose time (and even interests) are thereby circumscribed. To get enough (or “enough”) female intellectuals, in the blogosphere (sorry, can’t think of a better word) and elsewhere, you simply need a society that puts women on a more equal footing. As CT’s gender imbalance mirrors and likely in large part stems from a web-wide imbalance, so the web imbalance is a result of a still wider imbalance in society at large.

(On preview: mcm said the same thing only better, but I typed all that out and now I’m gonna damn well post it anyway.)

If you’re going to blame women for not “promoting” themselves enough, please remember that men have their share of 50% or better for not linking to female bloggers, instead preferring to talk about how much they’d like to link to female bloggers, if only those female bloggers tried strenously to get the attention of the male bloggers. If you do care to actually read some blogs, http://www.feministblogs.org is a good starting point, as is http://whatshesaid.the-goddess.org/, a long, long, long list that leftist female bloggers to not promote themselves.

I really don’t buy the homophily argument. The vast majority of the people on my blogroll are people I’ve never met and probably never will meet — the only connection is this electronical one, via the web. I don’t read Crooked Timber because I like the brand of gonad you bear, and I don’t (and can’t!) check out the boobs on the female bloggers before I link to them.

You’re going to have to have some kind of detectable writerly difference between the average male and female writer, like the self-promotion that you mention, in order for that kind of homophily to occur, and I don’t know if that’s real. I just looked over my academic blogroll, and out of 43, 22 were female. I thought I’d just tossed these people into the list because they were all strong and interesting writers, and hadn’t really thought about gender; am I operating on some different set of rules than other people?

And then I look at that other blog I’m on, the Panda’s Thumb — 1 out of 26 of the listed contributors is female. It’s not as if biology is a horribly male-dominated field, either. There is something going on, but I don’t have a clue what it is, and to be honest, this article doesn’t really help me understand, either.

And as another peculiarity, why are you writing about this? Why not one of the two women on CT? The article (and my comment here!) seem to be from an entirely male point of view, but this seems to be an issue that ought to be discussed in the voices of both genders. How much discussion did you have with female bloggers before writing this?

Interesting topic, but I’m not sure the reasons for the gender gap are clear to me either. Maybe we should ask why men get involved in political and/or academic blogging? The list of motives that have occurred to me (there may be more, or less): it allows them to bounce ideas off others, to advance arguments which seem to be ignored in the mainstream, to connect with and influence peers, to winnow their own thinking and communicate with people in a detached, virtual social setting, to engage in spirited debate with real people rather than straw men, to “hear themselves talk,” to be creative and free-form, etc. Do all of these motivations seem equally plausible for women bloggers?

Regardless of family obligations or not being able to use a web browser or whatever, a lot of women I know also feel the need to socialize with friends in person when they have spare time. I’d also throw out the idea that working in academia, or in nearly any professional setting, can often be more alienating and exhausting for women than for men, because they have less social support, more obligations (some of the time) for diminished economic rewards (most of the time), and the attendant stresses of the imposter complex and all the unspoken rules of the workplace. I don’t know if it’s true that women generally are less avid hobbyists than men, but I think there’s a marked enough gender difference in day-to-day social life that it’s plausible that the ways in which men and women choose to spend “down time” would be different too. And I think in some ways those quotidian differences are stronger among the “intelligentsia:” on the one hand, people think they’re more enlightened about or conscious of social behavior, and maybe they are; on the other hand, it’s harder to critique a culture internally which has partially institutionalized its own self-critique, because people become defensive and find the existing self-critique stressful enough without being forced to bend over *even further*.

I know also that gender-balanced intellectual communities do crop up, and where they do it often seems ridiculous to the participants that there would be a great difference between the sexes anywhere. I agree that it’s something you can’t engineer (this point was made earlier, mostly in jest, concerning posting quotas for this site’s female members): inasmuch as online communities are self-selecting you can’t demand that their dynamics just change themselves. There’s just no way to change macro-level conditioning at a small-group level: there are too many confounding factors to isolate any overriding trend or tendency; individual difference plays too great a role in the small-group dynamics. Um, but I don’t know that you can change society at a macro level either; probably best not to get into that.

I would tell you my own experiences with female acedemics but that would just lead to this comment being deleted. I agree, however, completely, there is an odd lack of female run blog’s.

I think most women feel embarrassed/ashamed/guilty/autistic/weird/deformed if they’re not primarily concerned with Family.

Maybe, but I’d hope that academic women and their partners would be beyond that kind of defeat.

What Amanda said, clickable style:

1) What She Said!

2) Feminist Blogs.

I think the relevant question is something like:

Why is the relative frequency of academic social scientist women bloggers substantially lower than the r.f. of assw’s in general?

Hypotheses such as too busy taking care of the kids, they’re blogging anonymously and “homophily” dominate this thread.

An alternative hypothesis is that academic women are bored to tears with pretentious multisyllabic words for everyday phenomena and also, have no interest in sparring with overconfident, pompous men any more than they already do.

Regardless of the explanation, the fact that the male/female ratio is much higher for academic bloggers than for academics should be of concern to any academic blogger who conceptualizes this activity as something in between a hobby (like golf or crocheting) and scholarship.

There are lots of women bloggers. But you wouldn’t know that from reading your blogroll. A number of the folks on your list are gone from the blogosphere. Others haven’t posted in months.

Meanwhile, a newer, perhaps more persistent group of bloggers has come along, and a lot of us are women. And we write about politics, academics, all that thoughtful stuff. Not just cooking, cleaning, and fashion.

I agree that it’s not 50-50; there are still more men blogging alone and together (that’s a strange picture) on serious subjects. But maybe you need to get out a little more and look at what’s out here.

There are lots of women bloggers. But you wouldn’t know that from reading your blogroll. … maybe you need to get out a little more and look at what’s out here.

We are not Technorati. If you are a VC and want to give us money to hire an intern, feel free. Instead, we have a “link policy”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/000273.html that just asks interested parties to email us if they think they should be on our list. Is this unreasonable? Spending time searching for what’s out there would entail getting out less, not more.

Why are domestic concerns considered narrow or limited? Everyone in the world has some kind of domestic life. That’s a pretty broad group.

“Why are domestic concerns considered narrow or limited?”

Because they are. Would CT be more interesting if the participants started posting exclusively about their domestic concerns? Not to me it wouldn’t. I avoid bloggers who go on and on about the school run and how hard it is to find good day care – just as I avoid real world human beings who go on and on about that and nothing else. Yes everybody has a domestic life; that doesn’t mean everybody wants to hear or talk about domestic life. Everybody has a GI tract, too, but that doesn’t mean everybody wants to hear or talk about each other’s digestive habits.

Why is it always guys who bring up the question about women bloggers?

It wasn’t in this case. My post is a response to a question asked — by a woman — about CT in a different thread.

good questions, but ones that have come up in a major way at least three or four times since I’ve been blogging

Yes. That’s why I said right at the start that “it may not be worth worth adding to the already already extensive body of commentary” on this topic.

And between this comment

Perhaps women bloggers are smarter. They’re going after the big advances.

and Deb’s above explaining that women blog less because they are just “bored to tears” with talking “pretentious multisyllabic” nonsense to “pompous men”, I’m beginning to feel like I was right.

“and Deb’s above explaining that women blog less because they are just “bored to tears” with talking “pretentious multisyllabic” nonsense to “pompous men”, I’m beginning to feel like I was right.”

No. See, this is exactly what I mean. (And I realize I’m saying it very, er, bluntly. But that’s kind of the point. It’s a bit taboo, I think. Especially for women!) I hate all this ‘women are too sensible for all this pretentious abstract stuff, they’d much rather talk about kids & spouses & feelings’ crap. It’s a kind of peer pressure to be ‘normal’ and want to talk more about the sandbox than religion and identity. Well bollocks to that.

I’ve been constipated lately, which seems to muddle my synapses a little; but it’s interesting, to me anyway, that in my daily-read bookmarks, which have a mix of news/intellect blogs and personal ones, the personal ones are near, at, or more than 50% female. It’s the virtual presence of women in my virtual social life. It’s the company of women.
This blog thing is so big it should be daunting to attempt to chart it, but then a lot of people’s response to daunting things is an immediate attempt to get it understood, or at least create a facsimile of understanding; to get it, get a handle on it. Academic blogs are a subset within a subset of a phenomenon that’s evolving exponentially, or at least it was an hour ago. Maybe it stopped. Probably it didn’t. One of the driving mechanisms, for post-Hegelian essayists or high school mall rodents, is display.
But I’m betting there’s a gender shift from the kids toward the grown-ups, with teenage girls mostly blogging in their age-range, and middle-aged men in theirs; and I’m betting it has a lot to do with the need for display changing with maturity and social positioning.
Love of ideas isn’t antithetical to need for attention, when they coincide interesting things happen.
Male peacocks have the irridescent fan. Females don’t. It’s heretical to suggest human displays have similar origins, mostly because they don’t, although they do sort of; and I’m comfortable with heresy, generally.
Now if I could just find that bottle of senna tabs…

The one thing that really drives me crazy in this is the idea that a lack of women political bloggers means that women aren’t interested in politics. I really don’t think that’s true as far as voter turnout, campaigns I’ve been involved in, etc. etc., all of which are much better indicators of political interest than blogging.

There was a survey in my law school that showed hugely different rates of volunteer class participation among men and women. It may be that blogging is another form of “public speaking.”

Also, I think the bloggers with the highest traffic started earliest, and there may have been more of a gender gap then.

There may something to the idea of pseudonyms too.

I meant to add a response to this post much earlier this evening, but I got distracted clicking through to Riba Rambles, ended up on a tangent about whether Buffy seasons 6 and 7 were as good as the previous five seasons, wrote an endless comment about that, which is most unlike me, as I hardly ever comment on other peoples’ blogs (yet have the gall to wish other people would comment more on my blog…), and then remembered my original purpose and returned here.

I have run a private blog with my spouse for about a year now, which is where we post our baby pictures and discuss cat shenanigans. For a long time I posted my extensive poltical commentary strictly on the private blog; recently, at the request of some of my readers (okay, my dad) who wanted to be able to pass the URL around, I’ve gone public with The Biscuit Report.

Like Riba I am not sure I want to put in the sustained effort to establish a large readership. The blogging itself is incredibly important to my intellectual life, and while I think some of my posts are good enough/important enough that I’d like them to get wider readership, I don’t in general have a pressing need to ‘make it big’. I do have other commitments in my life: notably, a 20-month old son, some contract work as a software engineer, a chronic illness to manage, and so on. So I make the time to post, but devote much less time to publicizing what I write.

Finally, while I realize that CT is an academic blog and thus it makes sense that some of the conversation focuses on women in academia, framing the question about female bloggers that way already limits it. I am not in academia or public policy. I do not hold an advanced degree. I am not on staff at a progressive monthly, and I am not a journalist. I am, in fact, mostly a stay-at-home mom. I nearly didn’t post a comment to this thread because my immediate reaction was “well, this discussion isn’t for people like me: it’s for people with credentials to blog, who know what they’re talking about.” Blogs were supposed to free us from all that, but there it is. I am a well-informed person who blogs regularly on politics because it helps me make sense of what I read, inform people who know me about things they may not otherwise know about, and contribute in some small way to democratic discourse, at least within my own tiny circle of influence. Very few educated people for whom it is not their job to do so make any kind of effort to think and write thoughtfully about politics, so, whatever my readership, I think that what I do will in the end turn out to be important to the revitalization of American Democracy (assuming it can be saved, which I certainly do not take as given). We need an army of ‘private intellectuals’ to start and sustain serious political conversations with small numbers of people they know. Grassroots intellectuals, if you will.

I suspect you may find many female bloggers hiding on the edges of the blogosphere, quietly thinking and writing about politics. Should we remain there, on the edges? Should an effort be made to get more connected? Or is it our job to look outward, to turn our gaze from our Technorati rankings and our connectedness to the center, and pull others, who are outside of political discourse altogether, into the conversation?

I think there is a competitive, sporting aspect to a lot of blogging that needs to be mentioned. When I sit down at my computer, if I am interested in reading a thoughtful and patiently argued essay, I will go to an online magazine or journal. If I’m in the mood to get into a good argument, I visit a blog.

The men I know tend to like to argue, especialy about politics. Fewer of the women I know enjoy the arguing. They are just as interested in politics, and have just as interesting things to say about it, but they don’t enjoy butting antlers over it. The blogosphere is full of vigorous debates, sometimes in the comments sections of a single blog, sometimes back and forth between bloggers.

I read three female-written blogs, Just World News, War and Piece and Body and Soul, pretty much every day. The blogs are interesting and well-written, and the writing is civil and thoughtful.

But the guys blogs are more fun.

My impression is that many women, when they write in their spare time, enjoy writing in a personal, creative, reflective and self-expressive mode. I do that sometimes. But personally, I most enjoy writing an argumentative essay where I rip another guy’s argument to shreds. And if he rips my argument to shreds before I go to bed, I sometimes can’t wait to get up in the morning so I can return the favor.

Maybe this is unhealthy. But I enjoy the aggressive dimension of the blogosphere and indulge in it to sharpen my argumentative teeth.

I toss stuff into my newsreader,
because that’s easy, but getting in there and editing the stuff on the
web page? That’s work.

You can auto-generate a blogroll with Bloglines so that your blogroll is updated every time you update your feeds. Maybe other readers do something similar?

“..like model airplanes”

Good analogy. Even setting up a blog and wrestling with the all attendant hoo-ha like RSS feeds, MT Blacklist et al, does seem to fit in with the kinda tunnel version that boys (and men) do tend get into more often than dames (sorry, birds).

And the point about the blogsphere evolving through its uptake by particular subcultures and response to outside events is also well taken.

As is “Patience!” It wasn’t until I was six that I could master the art of interaction with the opposite sex in a way that allowed equal time for both, without resorting to applied scatology.

Afterthoughts – when MY made his rather offensive, assumption-riddled post, we had a long discussion on this on my blog, because it echoed discussions that used to happen all the time in fandom, particularly in Usenet days, but now mostly seems to happen when outsiders are talking about fandom – the “why are there almost no women sf writers/sf readers/gamers” followed by “I think it’s because of X (sexist assumption follows)” posts which used to start massive threads filled with various posters and lurkers revealing their gender and the fact that there was hardly the imbalance believed, and that the poster hadn’t realized that, say, CL Moore and James Tiptree were female, let alone counted how many current bestselling authors like CJ Cherryh and Elizabeth Moon were out there, and then the hapless fanboy would scuttle off daunted by Amazons, saying “but I still think that women don’t read Tolkien because they’re naturally nurturing and want to read about female characters not battles–”

So there was a certain sense of deja vu to it all, particularly when it became clear that MY was (like most young collegiate types) talking without having bothered to review the data in any detail.

Kieran however is approaching it with less of the pop-sci assumption quality and associated offensiveness, and so as a result there is more thoughtful dialogue and less snark (not that snark doesn’t have its place) in response.

Now, I was raised as a Theocon, and “feminist” was a dirty word where I grew up, in the world of conservative Catholic academia (yes, it exists, just below Ultima Thule) so my feminism and view of gender politics is something arrived at quite erratically and eclectically, often reinventing wheels, and with much resistance on my part. It’s only been about four years that I’ve fully accepted that I have been all along a crypto-liberal who was lied to about the non-biased and justice-based nature of conservativism.

Thus I never believed the “colonized minds/repressed women/double standard” arguments, for a long time, because after all I wasn’t told it was my duty to be selfless, giving, self-effacing, “not proud,” not selfish, but obedient and good all the time, *because* I was a girl, but because those were the proper norms for human beings, regardless of gender.

And yet – and yet – I was required to be responsible and giving and caring and never to be selfish or demand anything, and likewise my sisters – while my younger brothers were given far more leeway and less discipline, and the argument was made that “they were boys, boys need freedom,” or that boys didn’t have the natural inclination to order and domesticity thus it was futile, even though *I* certainly didn’t have the natural inclination to order and domesticity either, that’s what the fights were about, that I’d rather be watching ST:TNG and reading Bradbury than doing the dishes, too!

And so, facing up to this double standard, in how we were raised and increasingly encountering the dichotomy between the lofty, pedestal praise of womanhood (maternal or virginal) among intellectual Catholic conservatives, and the way that it actually played out, with us lucky bints “getting” all the noble opportunities for moral virtue and heroic self-sacrifice like having to stay home with six kids instead of going to a lecture with friends from work, which the paterfamilias “had” to do, poor sod — it started to wear pretty thin, that illusion of parity.

So yes, it is there, it just is often camouflaged. How? Well, I’ve done a lot of observation of animal behavior, which makes more sense of how people behave than most psyche theories. Look at it as a process of rewarding behaviors, passively or actively, or else punishing them, the same way: just as you can reward a horse for a bad behavior by ignoring it, thus encouraging him to yank the reins out of your hands again, and harder, or punish a horse for good behavior by ignoring it, by not praising her or patting her when she correctly executes a lead change, so too with humans. Just as you endorse your dog snapping and snatching when you don’t reprimand her consistently for it, and end up with a nasty biter, or discourage him from coming to your call by not being as enthuiastic and thrilled when he does it as he is, the same for children and young adults (or adult coworkers.)

You can kill the enthusiasm of your employees by paying attention only to your friends’ achievments, taking everyone else’s hard work for granted, and ignoring the office bullies and slackers.

And the same goes with human gender-specific behavior.

If you ignore a sexist sneer because you don’t want to be thought a bitch or humorless (or worse yet, gay or PC) or praise a male child’s success while ignoring the achievements of your daughter, then you have contributed to rampant sexism just as much as if you made the “cunt” comment yourself or told your daughter explicitly that she was fit for nothing more than bearing children and cleaning up after men.

Kieran, I agree it’s work to stay current on blogrolls. And it is easy to miss the “academic link policy” on the right sidebar.

So, I accept the opportunity and will email to Henry several women bloggers (and others too) who are scholars.

My biggest worry is not that I’m a woman and will get lousy comments; it’s whether I’ll ever get a job if somebody decides they don’t like my views.

I’m still not sure if Kieran is a man or a woman, because I don’t know whether “Kieran” is a man or a woman’s name. For the longest time I assumed Kieran was a woman, but I guess now it’s clear he’s a man, even if, before writing this post, I found myself googling to doublecheck.

Anyway, on the internet, who cares?

If someone really needs to know the background of the person writing an argument on political or social issues, my guess is that they are not really trying to evaluate the argument.

I think Katherine’s comment above hits on something important. I’d like to reiterate her observation about women’s interest in politics, particularly in response to Ophelia’s concern: that women are, on average, uninterested in politics, because they’re too busy planning their weddings or something, seems entirely wrong to me. (Does that honestly ring true to your personal experience, Ophelia? Because then, maybe you just need to get out more. There are lots of cool chicks out there.) It becomes very difficult to speculate about such things without sounding essentialist and flaky, but to the extent that there are forces of socialization that cause women to be more hesitant about public speaking than men are, it makes sense to me that the same forces might play a role in disparate blogging numbers.

I can’t be dismissive of homophily as an explanation, either, because I’ve had it invoked to me by various male peers to explain why they respond more to comments made by other men in class, etc. It does strike me as a deeply weird thing, though, so I understand the skepticism about it in this thread.

Ugh. At this point I should admit that a large part of the reason I’m posting this late in the thread, mostly to say, “I agree with Katherine” is that discussions like this always elicit a kneejerk identitarian response in me. I’m a girl! And I like politics! And I don’t think Crooked Timber is nefariously sexist in some way! It’s ridiculous and I’m not proud of it (and frankly, I’m still irritated at Deb Frisch for provoking such an identitarian discussion.)

Dan K said:

“I think there is a competitive, sporting aspect to a lot of blogging that needs to be mentioned. When I sit down at my computer, if I am interested in reading a thoughtful and patiently argued essay, I will go to an online magazine or journal. If I’m in the mood to get into a good argument, I visit a blog.

The men I know tend to like to argue, especialy about politics. Fewer of the women I know enjoy the arguing…. personally, I most enjoy writing an argumentative essay where I rip another guy’s argument to shreds. And if he rips my argument to shreds before I go to bed, I sometimes can’t wait to get up in the morning so I can return the favor.”

I’m glad Dan enjoys this, and I bet that hot arguments attract blog readers. However, at ‘Maternal & Child Health’ I am hoping we can do things differently. Come to think of it, however, I’m not exactly wearing my testosterone on my sleeve with that title…

Moreover, despite the title and subject matter of the ‘Maternal & Child Health’ blog, most of the commenters so far have been male. I hope it’s just a small *N* problem…

Bill,

I also try to do things differently. On my own blog, I tend to write longish essays, shorter informative pieces chock full of links to essays, articles or news stories I’ve been reading on a certain topic, discussion of books I have been reading, along with some framing and commentary.

I intentionally restrain myself from linking to other blogs, except those that that contain particularly thoughtful material, and stay out of the many inter-blog food fights, gossipy frivolity, and hot pursuit of breaking news stories. Thus I am not particularly “plugged in” to the blog world, and that’s the way I like it. If there is something I would like a lot of people to read, I try to generate some interest by leaving a link in comments sections of other blogs, or submitting the essay to other sites, but I’m not particularly aggressive about this.

But the highly interconnected fusion of blogs known as the “blogosphere,” with the most visited blogs at the top of the food chain, does seem to be driven a good deal by competition and argument, and sometimes vicious attacks and counterattacks. There is a struggle for dominance of some kind, and a large mass of readers that flows like a mob from one site to the next.

Sometimes I’m in the mood for a good strenuous argument, and for mixing it up, or have an overpowering urge to try to forcibly insert my voice into a large national or international conversation, and I participate in the debates in the comments sections of popular political blogs for that purpose. But I try to keep my own blog out of this raucus internet saloon, and maitain a quiet corner for myself and a few readers.

Hey! That isn’t funny!

Argh, evil twin post. And I even checked in a new window after I got the “internal server error” message before reposting.

–Deb, why are you pulling this classic passive-aggressive behavior? Do you have your own blog? Yes. Did you promote it by saying, “as I said in my post X here” – No. Did you start out by asking CT to carry you as a guest columnist and were refused? No, you’re behaving in a disfunctional way stereotypical of women, tho’ all too common among men – sulking while feeling snubbed, and then snapping and making it out to be a persecution and you a martyr on behalf of your gender. Not an impressive showing for the sex, old gel–

–Actually bill, I personally find that male bloggers tend to be *less* given to rousing arguments than female – but then, that may just be the circles I hang out with! Certainly I get enough male posters telling me I’m too mean, too caustic, not nice enough, at least as many as female ones. And I find the commentless, dispassionate tone of many blogs by male academics, or the commentless, snarky-but-not-interactive ones of other male academics, to be completely boring.

Of course the fun liberal blogs, like World O’Crap and aligned eccentrics – does anyone *really* know what the gender of the Fafbloggers are? – like Sadly No! and Adam Felber, don’t agonize over identity politics, having *way* too much fun tearing the ears off sexist wingers of both genders with ambivalent glee.

One small data point: an acquaintance of mine, a smart woman with a Master’s degree in women’s studies, who’s pursuing a career in social work, and has been politically active (with the Green party) doesn’t have a CT-style blog, but has an online diary.

The content is very girly/personal/gossipy. Shopping, clothes, boys, etc. No particular intellectual content. Kinda disappointing, actually.

The point being, it’s unlikely anyone reading her diary would invite her to participate in a group blog like CT, and there’s not much evidence she’d have any interest in doing so, even though it might seem like she’d have something to say.

What’s the gender breakdown of LiveJournal sites, or bloglike diary sites?

Rather than saying “women blog less”, perhaps we should be looking at what they are, in fact, doing online.

Whether or not Kieran Healy’s homophily-based explanation is correct with respect to the particular case of this blog, or of “the blogosphere” in general, it seems a tad presumptuous to offer the thesis — although I’m not sure that it’s being offered by anybody, the tone of certain comments certainly tends to suggest it’s being offered — that there’s something about the atmosphere at CT or the CT ‘management’ that actively discourages blogging by women.

It might be that there’s an explanation that works in the general case, but it just turns out that, in the case of this or that blog, that something else is the correct story. It could turn out that the particular bloggers at CT that happen to be male just happen, as a group, to make more posts than the particular bloggers at CT that happen to be female). That a sample generally comports with a general trend does not in and of itself establish that the reason the sample comports with the trend admits of the same explanation as the general trend.

And of course, it might be a whole swack of different explanations that hold sway in different regions of the blogosphere, that there is no single general explanation of the trend. Assuming, of course, that it is a trend.

Just sayin’.

Roxanne:
Why is it you fellas never ask where all the African-American political bloggers are? Or the Latino political bloggers? Or the gay political bloggers? Or the disabled political bloggers?

Time to remind that excellent post by Antigone over at XX (I assume you already know this Feminist Women groupblog).

Of course, Kieran was talking about women scholar bloggers, but that really doesn’t change much. Not to be judgemental or anything (how could I, in my position?), but, as far as I can tell, the mentality at work is just the same.

Since I’m mentioning XX, Ophelia Payne sums it up rather concisely in the latest entry.

What I find odd about this discussion is the complete absence of any reference to _power_. It’s a really big internet, so the lack of gender balance on a randomly chosen site is just not that significant. The mere existence of Crooked Timber does not in any way prevent women from starting blogs. Unlike a university or a corporation it has no actual power.

“Since I’m mentioning XX, Ophelia Payne sums it up rather concisely in the latest entry.”

Who? Who? Who? Are you telling me there’s another one…?

Another thought:

Blogging isn’t really a discussion, it’s more like a lecture with optional Q&A at the end. It’s less of a conversational model than, say, Usenet or mailing lists.

Maybe, just maybe, when it comes to discussing academics or politics, many women prefer a more conversational mode to the lecture mode of blogging.

If there’s a preference among (some/many) women for diary-style blogging, it would kinda fit this, because writing in a diary isn’t a conversational mode, either, and they aren’t seeking a dialogue.

Perhaps males (often) like to pursue dialogue via blogs, whereas women (often) prefer other media for dialogue.

“There’s plenty of dialogue within and among many of the blogs by female academics that I’ve read.”

Well, yes, of course, but it’s qualitatively different than dialogue in a usenet group or a mailing list. At least, it seems that way to me.

You have a blog post, and perhaps comments to the post. But the blog post and the comments don’t really have the same status.

Responses posted on other blogs have the same status, in this sense, they’re peers, but they’re somewhat disconnected from the post they are responding to. They’re like an article in a journal which responds to an article in the prior issue.

On usenet and mailing lists, on the other hand, all postings are equal, and IMHO there’s more immediacy. It’s a closer approximation to a vocal conversation.

Maybe it doesn’t make a difference, maybe it does.

It would be useful to look at the gender balance of blog commenters, rather than just at the people who have had sufficient interest and initiative to set up their own blogs. See how that compares to the numbers for full bloggers.

I can’t believe someone else hasn’t commented on this yet, is this supposed to be an excuse for there not being more women on CT – “we maxed-out the roster”?

No. I was explaining that CT grew more quickly than any of us expected and in ways we didn’t deliberately plan for. If we’d known where we were going to end up, we might have done things differently. As it was, by the time we got to 15 regulars last March we decided that things were threatening to get out of hand and we should stop adding new people.

Not given to a source-search at the moment, I distinctly recall reading in the past week that the majority of bloggers are women. As I read this on the internet, it’s obviously true.

Beyond that, I’m sure at an earlier, clear-headed hour, I could name dozens of female academics who blog, roughly equivalent to the number of male academics I’m aware of.

I think there’s quite a few in both genders who don’t publicize their academic status, too, possibly indicating a preference not to bring the work world home, or into their avocational world.

With the explosion of blogs that’s occurred in the last year alone, though, I doubt that anyone short of a professional pollster could come close to the truth about the gender ratio, so a lot of what I’m hearing here seem to be conclusions drawn on hypotheses that are likely to be false.

When I first read Deb’s questions and followed the thread, I took it as a semi-serious question coupled with good-natured nose-tweakings. It seems to have devolved from there a bit (or my perceptions have evolved) and I’ll add a note in defense of the group blogging process in general.

As was pointed out, group blogs often go through a growth process that can differ for many reasons. One group may evolve from online individual bloggers grown chummy over time (I suspect that’s the CT genealogy), others may involve active recruiting among a limited number of blogs within a topic area, and others may have a conscious ‘mastermind’ actively recruiting affirmatively … or not.

And that’s just where the fun begins. Many group blogs include folks blogging at their own blogs, which can turn a burdensome hobby into real work. The resulting attrition rate pays no attention to desired quotas, either, so the aim going in can evolve to something quite different.

I do think it adds to any neighborhood to pursue some degree of diversity, for the sake of fresh perspective. I don’t buy into some of the claims I’ve heard here, like men being generally more competitive anywhere, with the exception of recreational games.

I can’t think of any work environment where that’s been evident. I mean, I can recall some obsessively competitive fellows, but they were the exception, not the rule. And even among that minority, I found that some had the tools to compete with, but most were simply narcissistic boors.

Similarly, I don’t see a high degree of women bloggers blogging about kids and domestic matters except among those where their principal daily activity is homemaking, or when they can find great amusement that can be passed on anecdotally (a la Erma Bombeck… or the blogger known as Happy Funball at Uncommon-tater).

Surely, some gender distinctions are likely to exist (I know way more women obsessed with shoes for example, than men are. And men don’t generally get ga-ga about baby clothing unless it involves something hideous for head adornment.) Some men prefer to keep the company of men in their idle time, and some are as likely to enjoy goofing off with women.

If a group blogger aims for community and camaraderie, the blog will evolve towards that pursuit. If the greater goal is a full exploration of more lofty thoughts, it can likely find it enhancing to pursue a diversity of perspectives. So the bottom line isn’t what a commenter wants, but what a team is comfortable providing.

Geeze, guess I should have read your entire post before that last comment. Homophily, is it? Okay, that defines a fair amount of what I said.

But in the academic world, isn’t there a concern about homophilies recruiting?

Sorry to be late to this discussion, but I hardly ever read Crooked Timber. Too academic. I was directed here by a friend.

DEMAND FOR ATTENTION AND REWARDS: WhirledView comments on world politics and most everything else.

We are three WOMEN with lots of experience around the world. (Now tell the truth, how many of you, men and women, sniggered lightly at that? Never would have happened to men. One reason women don’t come to these discussions easily.)

We do not consider ourselves academic, although we all have various degrees of connection to the academic world. Frankly, we don’t want to limit ourselves in the ways that academia too often requires.

The arguments above, mostly essentialist, mostly coming from men, seem absurd to me. They’ve been running in these circles since the sixties and perhaps longer. And at that time, we all were assured that all this would be cleared up as more women got into the academic pipeline. Ha.

I’ve had to put up with various ignorings and putdowns simply because I’m a woman. I’ve done the argumentative thing on a discussion board. (Men really do have a hard time losing to a woman.) I’ve gotten to a point where I can choose to ignore all that and do a blog with people whose intellect I respect.

Check us out.

Phew! What a magnificent collection of tangents! (If you have
read through this far, take a break!)

The discovery that CT is an "academic" blog has taken me
completely by surprise. That the contributors to CT are academic professionals I
knew, and it followed that matters of interest to academic professionals would
appear in CT, and probably in an academic tone. But to learn that the
contributors post entries on CT they do so qua academic professionals,
and with other academic professionals in mind is oddly chilling. I don’t say
that it’s a mistake. But I should have thought that the primary appeal of a
collaborative Web log of CT’s caliber – the appeal to its contributors, that is
Рwould have been the opportunity to relax d̩formations professionelles.

I nearly stopped at Biscuit’s posting. Her call for "private
intellectuals" is terrifically important. And I praise Ophelia Benson for
admitting that she’s not sure how she feels about this matter, from the very
asking of the question on down. I’ll be mulling over Dan Kervick’s two posts for
quite some time, and possibly even quoting them, because I’m bemused by the
duality of the "thoughtful guy" who likes to "mix it up."

As to Kieran’s question, I suspect that established academic
women, who will not have had blogging as a resource during their training, might
tend to regard the blogosphere with suspicion: just another one of the boys’ new
toys, and a spectacular way to get into trouble. New as it is, the
Blogosphere already requires its own Baedeker.

I’m certainly interested in politics. I’ve written about them for two years at Iddybud. I also wax political (blog-style) at the Syracuse newspaper website, Syracuse.com. The real question should be: Why aren’t more women recognized for their political blogging?

Here are some of the women of blogging.

Argh. This is getting a bit frustrating.

I consider my blog academic—though it isn’t counted in your sample, b/c it’s pseudonymous. Why is pseudonymity not academic?

Whoever said it wasn’t? Your blog *is* “in our sample” because it’s on our academic blogroll. It wasn’t coded for gender in Henry’s quick survey because he was trying to count how many people on that list were women, and having a pseudonymous blog — even one called ‘bitch, phd’ — meant he was better off not counting it one way or the other for the purpose at hand. Where in that process is there the assumption that pseudonymous blogs aren’t academic?

I enjoy them precisely because their definition of “academic” is broader than what I think you mean, which is either “subject-specific” or “research-oriented.” … I enjoy them precisely because their definition of “academic” is broader than what I think you mean, which is either “subject-specific” or “research-oriented.” … It seems kind of circular to say that women don’t blog academically, and then to dismiss women who question what, precisely, is meant by “academic” …

Look, I completely agree, and so does “our academic link policy”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/000273.html. It says, in part,

bq. The qualifications are fairly straightforward. First, if you either have an academic position at a university type institution, or are a Ph.D. student or equivalent … Second, if you have a Ph.D., but are pursuing another career … and keep a blog that sort-of relates to your field of specialization, … Third, if you don’t qualify under the formal criteria, but think that you provide a venue for specialized academic discussion

*Of course* people who write about teaching, or harbor doubts about the state of academia or question what academics are supposed to be doing will — and do — qualify for inclusion on the blogroll. That stuff is about 80% of what academics chatter about. We write about that stuff ourselves all the time! Look at Harry’s last post or Eszter’s last post or _this_ post, for crying out loud. And we don’t care whether you’re anonymous, either. Do you think we wouldn’t have counted Invisible Adjunct as an academic blog?

I honestly don’t see how you think I deserve your complaint on the basis of the content of the post or the makeup of our academic blogroll.

If you are a regular reader of this blog, I don’t see how you can accuse people like Kieran of never framing questions in ways that are relevant to women and a feminist perspective. (And when you say “feminism never seems to count as “political.” – count where and for what?)

Several Timberites – regardless of their gender – have addressed questions such as work/family responsibilities among heterosexual couples, childrearing, representation of women in various professions, etc. These questions are taken just as seriously as other issues discussed on this blog.. and they are issues that have shown up here throughout the life of this blog.

Bitchphd, you say you accuse no one but it seems you think you have a pretty serious complaint against CT. You seem to be complaining, specifically, that Kieran – or CT in general – understands ‘academic’ and/or ‘academic blog’ in some unduly narrow way. But the things you cite as being outside our allegedly unduly narrow compass are – so far as I can tell – clearly within our compass. Neither CT post contents nor its blogroll (which are two different things, mind you) demand that ‘academic’ be understood except with wooliest generosity. For that matter, most posts can be read and understood without any particular conception of ‘academic’ in mind at all. (And I take it the rules for getting into the blogroll are clear and inclusive enough?)

Can you point to any concrete example of us excluding someone or something, let alone a class of someones or somethings, as non-academic, which you would consider broadly academic? Many of the posts on CT are totally non-academic, and posters aren’t kicked off the roster. We don’t police the blogroll against bloggers engaged in extra-curricular activities. You allege exclusive, blinkered attitudes but provide no evidence of exclusions or blinkers.

You write:

It’s just that when the boys ask this question every few months, they define “academic” and “political” in ways that are highly exclusive. For one thing, feminism never seems to count as “political.” For another thing, men asking this question always seem to assume that they are the default; that what counts as political/academic to them is universal (which I detected in the post to which I was responding).

I find this implausible, but this ought to be the sort of issue that can be settled in an agreeable way. Please provide evidence of these bi-monthly exclusions; also, evidence that feminism is denied by CT’ers to be a sort of political attitude or position (what, then, would it be?) Also, where is the default maleness in the post?

Also, what do you mean ‘where are the women?’ is a silly question. If it is silly, doesn’t it follow that your concerns about exclusion are silly? But you don’t seem to think they are silly. Please explain.

I’m too lazy to do your research for you, jholbo. But if you explore around the blogs of a lot of the women posting on this thread, you’ll see them talking about this issue, and you’ll find links (there’s one in here, I forget whose comment it is, though, but it’s to the blog XX) to posts in response to this very same question coming up before.

My comments were intended to be taken in that larger context.

Please provide evidence of these bi-monthly exclusions; also, evidence that feminism is denied by CT’ers to be a sort of political attitude or position (what, then, would it be?)

jholbo, allow me. Bitch PhD is speaking more generally than CT alone. The “where are the women” discussion occurs about every three months (no kidding), and has been asked by Pandagon, Yglesias, Kevin Drum, and others. It’s frustrating because once the question is asked and the female bloggers have turned out to answer that we are indeed here, the question is cast aside, the blogrolls and interlinking don’t change, and no resolution is made on any level other than occasionally finding an unexpected ally here and there.

One “academic” study on blogging addressed political blogs as those who addressed politics only, and the philosophy of personal politics was left out of that equation, effectively rendering most feminist bloggers out there apolitical and obsolete. So, as you asked, if feminism isn’t political, what is it? According to these kinds of studies (which end up being largely masturbatory and reify the maleness of the blogosphere [hate that word]) feminism doesn’t exist other than a branch of liberal politics so tertiary that it is nearly ignored altogether.

And with these frustrations, you get the otherwise unexplainable tension on this thread.

Wow, love the rigourous research methodology. Bitch PhD and Lauren say a certain peheomenon occurs regularly. But when bitch is asked by jholbo to give a few examples, she bitchily tells him she won’t do his research for him. Well, guess she didn’t get that name for nothing.

Then Lauren chimes in to say that Bitch is right on, happens all the time, but again no links and/or examples just a lot of straw man punching.

Gals, no links, no examples = no credibility.

Call me Bitch MA.

Uh, that’s plenty of links, excuse me.

Part II

That would be chicks not checks. calling dr. freud.

clancy, i just assumed at first you were a tom and then i realized that was silly and that you too might be a gal/chick/bird.

must avoid strong cocktails!!!! (heh)

I was bitchy b/c the information is out there, not hard to find, and it’s lazy to ask women (and women do get asked, every single time this comes up, and no I’m not going to go link-searching for anyone) to “prove” that what they’re saying isn’t a load of crap.

B/c of course, gals, by definition, lack credibility.

It wastes our time to continually teach feminism 101, and I refuse to do it.

Yeah, bitch except this isn’t feminism 101. this is feminism 511, stuff that those nice feminism 101 explanations don’t cover.

and no, women aren’t asked any more often than men to back up their cases.

i remeber once being pissed off at a boss for what i thought was a patronizing paternalistic lecture. Then a male colleague came into my office and informed me he’d just received the same lecture.

of course that doesn’t mean that there aen’t any more “little lady” lectures going on out there. it just means that not everything you think is an anti-feminist putdown is in fact an anti-feminist putdown.

time to move beyond feminism 101 bitch. progress happens. theories need modification. get with the times gal. whoops, sorry, I mean bitch. Cuz you all have let me know that unlike gal, bitch isn’t at all offensive.

now, fare the well. enjoy wallowing in feminism 101.

I honestly wasn’t criticizing CT’s blogroll (didn’t I say that already?). I’m not invested in whether or not women are on CT’s blogroll; I honestly don’t care. I was just objecting to the reiteration of the “where are the women bloggers” question.

Having said that. I never asked to be on CTs blogroll; I have no idea how I ended up there, though I get hits fairly regularly off of CT. No, I wouldn’t have emailed to ask to be on it; possibly b/c the blogroll is (or was, until Playing School and I ended up on it) discipline-specific, and I don’t declare my discipline on my blog. Or maybe b/c I’m just not inclined to ask to be noticed–am quite willing to speak up if I’m around, but not that self-promoting. Also, as I said in this post, my own academic blogroll is pretty long, and about 75% women.

I realize that CT is going for a “definitive” academic blogroll (not that such a thing is ever really achievable). My objection isn’t so much to saying, “gosh, we don’t seem to have a lot of women on the blogroll, wonder why?” as it is to the turn the conversation took, which was to start throwing out a lot of stereotypical explanations for what’s wrong with women/women bloggers: they don’t self-promote, their blogs aren’t academic enough, whatever. (I also think it’s silly to exclude pseudonymous blogs: it’s not that easy to find out the gender of most pseudonymous bloggers–through either content or simply clicking on their profile or “about me” page. That’s how I determined the gender of a lot of people on my own blogroll, just for the sake of argument.)

In other words, if CT feels their blogroll isn’t inclusive enough, that’s their problem, not the women bloggers’ problem; and if CT wants to, they can fix it. If they don’t want to (b/c admittedly, it’s work–and I don’t blame them, for the same reason that I don’t go link-hunting to support statements about things I know to be fact–it’s a blog, not a thesis), then they don’t have to. No one was complaining about CT’s blogroll except CT. If CT wants to add more links, there have been a lot provided in this very thread to help out.

pollie anon, first, I’m not and was not “mad” about anything, I quoted your line on linking and credibility because it sounded patronising and made a joke about it. I think it’s amusing to address all “gals” by telling them they should learn linking and quoting to get credibility, when you consider the tactics of some of the popular political bloggers like “professor” Reynolds. Joke explained, how boring. Secondly, I’m not a “dude”. I understood what bitch pd meant as referred in general to that “where are the women” question, not necessarily how it came up here. I don’t read blogs based on gender but on content. I totally agree with what bellatrys said about the fun blogs like Sadly No!, Poor Man, Felber (Roy Edroso too) which take the piss out of sexist wingnuts of both genders. I don’t think I should welcome more women bloggers just because they’re women, regardless of what they write. It doesn’t automatically bring more “diversity”. So to me the question is a non-issue. The way deb frisch raised it was patronising, as she was treating “the lovely ladies” (her words) here as tokens rather than individuals. Whenever that WATW question has popped up before, I don’t know it seems to me it’s inevitably flawed because how many women bloggers you see and read depends entirely on your own selection of blogs. There’s no such thing as a blogosphere that’s fixed and the same for everyone. Unless by that we only mean the top 100 in Technorati or something like that, but that’s not a personal kind of selection. So it’s just amusing to see people try and explain, sometimes in terms of generalisations (women probably like to do this more and do that less; maybe women are less interested in this and that, and so on), a phenomenon – the supposed lower presence of women in blogs – whose existence or inexistence is based entirely on which sites you read. I do think there can be forms of bias in the “top” lists, in how popularity builds or how credibility, indeed, is perceived and assigned. That probably reflects similar mechanisms in society at large. I don’t know, I don’t really see the need for generalisations. Some people say women tend to prefer writing about personal life and mixing it with political commentary, I don’t know if that’s true, but look at Lileks. He’s more incoherent and rambling than the worst stereotype of women, goes on and on about his little daughter, poor girl, his shopping and home life and all that, yet in his accolade he’s an authority. On the other hand, you come across very entertaining accounts of personal experiences told by both men and women, like dooce’s posts about getting fired. They were not strictly “political” but at the same time they were. It doesn’t depend on the gender of the writer (or reader), if something is an interesting read or not.

Since we’re all keen on having others do our research for us, Clancy was kind enough to compile a link of links directly related to WATW.

http://culturecat.net/node/637

Additional references are welcome.

bq. All I was saying was that the discussion at hand shows that it isn’t “perfectly” clear. Some people mean “research,” some people mean “not anonymous,” some people mean “any blog by a person with an advanced degree.”

Bitch Ph.D. – who exactly, apart from you, said that blogs that are “not anonymous” aren’t academic? Certainly not me – the reason that I didn’t count pseudonymous blogs in my quick-and-dirty count, as Kieran said, is that it’s messy data, not because they aren’t academic. The “Who Knows?” category on the academic blogroll was created precisely in order to include people who didn’t want to ‘fess up to their discipline b/c they were worried it would give them away, wanted to bitch about the profession etc etc. Is there anyone who’s seriously arguing that blogs which aren’t totally dedicated to academic research are _ipso facto_ not academic blogs? Certainly not me, not Kieran, not John.

Pseudonymous academic blogs count for us. We specifically reject the narrow definition of politics (see umpteen posts by Kieran, Harry etc in the past). It seems to me that a lot of this argument is heat and air – you came into this debate with a grievance which you never explained very well. You slide between general gripes about male attitudes in the blogosphere, and specific beefs with CT in a way that’s extremely evasive – you don’t seem to want to be pinned down as to what you’re actually arguing, or who you’re arguing against. One moment, it’s that the sample is skewed (fair enough – but that’s something that we acknowledge upfront; if you want to do a count including pseudonymous blogs you’re welcome to, and I’d be interested to see your findings), the next it’s that we (or somebody who’s left unspecified) don’t count pseudonymous blogs as real academic blogs. There’s a real argument to be had, but you seem to me to be mostly blowing smoke.

bq. The “where are the women” discussion occurs about every three months (no kidding), and has been asked by Pandagon, Yglesias, Kevin Drum, and others. It’s frustrating because once the question is asked and the female bloggers have turned out to answer that we are indeed here, the question is cast aside, the blogrolls and interlinking don’t change, and no resolution is made on any level other than occasionally finding an unexpected ally here and there.

Lauren – I think that this doesn’t apply to the CT academic blogroll, which does try specifically and deliberately to be as inclusive as possible. I think that the issue is slightly different here. It’s not so much one of refusing to change the blogroll, as that the academic blogroll at the moment seems to underrepresent women quite substantially. This could indeed be because there’s a large group of women academics out there that we’re not taking account of (Jill has already pointed me to several), but it does seem to me to point to some underlying structural issues – the disparity is large enough that it seems to me to be unlikely to be a result of our sample, given the open linking policy, and our relatively high level of visibility. I’m happy that Clancy seems to be undertaking some serious research on this – look forward to seeing what she comes up with. To the extent that there are women academics out there who should be on our blogroll, I’d like to hear about them so that I can add them. If the women academic bloggers turn out to answer that they’re here, I’ll only be delighted.