Is Gender Important in Blogging?
August 7, 2007 by Adrienne
Morra Aarrons has a interesting post on techPresident about the gender gap in the blogosphere.
Honestly, I’m not sure how I feel about this. Even though I’m an educated woman, I usually roll my eyes at feminism and gender inequalities. As a conservative, I wish that we could eliminate quotas and special interests and operate by merit, but that’s never going to happen.
It’s interesting that the group taking on the “party of middle-aged white guys” is actually a group of middle-aged white guys.
Sure it’s important to represent women, especially when women make up 50% of bloggers, but how far do we have to take this? Your blog is what you put into it. Is blogging like income disparity? Are men more likely to promote their blogs just as they’re more likely to ask for a raise?
There’s an interesting marketing rule that women will respond to campaigns aimed towards men, but men won’t respond to campaigns aimed towards women. Take a look at what women write. Sure they discuss politics and news, but it’s between posts about crafts, shopping, chick lit, gossip and child-rearing stories. They’re also largely pink and flowery. Women will read political and sports blogs, but how many men voluntarily wade through Blogher for fun?
There are several interesting research projects here, but I don’t think we need to pull the gender gap card yet. The web defies traditional media consumption patterns, and there’s much more reasearch that needs to be done before we sound any alarms.
Thoughts? Arguments? Complaints? I’d love to hear feedback on this topic.
18 Responses to “Is Gender Important in Blogging?”
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I noticed you didn’t have any pink or flowers in your design. Neither do I.
If a blogger buried political commentary among posts on fishing, baseball, car crap, etc., and was decorated in a lovely steel-gray tool motif, I’d pass too.
This isn’t to say I don’t like floral, I do. I adored the floral swirls among bejeweled menus with smiling birds, toddlers, and dolphins riding unicorns into a blissful sunset from a serene pasture.
I miss those. But I’m in a different frame of mind then.
Sobi
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Hello. Your entry caught my eye in the dashboard. My two cents:
Methinks it has the makings for an interesting research, this gender gap, but, I agree that we don’t “need to pull the gender gap card yet”. People, whether male or female, blog about what interests them. Why are there less women blogging about poilitics? See previous sentence. Gender differences do exist and it’s reflected in blogging, too.
Well I really do not think very much about “the gender gap”
I had read one specific blog for a while because I liked the posts, and they were well writin. Then later I found out that blogger was a women. Didn’t change how I felt about the blog.
So I really do not think that gender really has to much to do with blogs with purly American visitors. Though when dealing with other countries, it is a little scetchy because sexism is everywhere in many countries.
Even though I don’t always write like a female in my blogs, one can still tell. It’s just the way I write about some things, but that doesn’t bother me.
One thing I have noticed about around 50% of the male-blogs I’ve read: They have no sense of grammar. It’s not that I have a problem with it–okay, I DO–but females seem to get over that phase in their teens when having a blog.
Of course though, to each their own.. A male blogger may just go and talk about a chick flick, but what are the odds of it? It happens, but it’s about as often as a female blogger going into detail about how they disassembled an engine.
Yes, there is a “gender gap,” but here’s the wonderful thing about the internet: People aren’t always who they seem. So, that oddly masculine blog you read might just be written by a woman that has an online male avatar. Who knows?
“People, whether male or female, blog about what interests them. Why are there less women blogging about poilitics?”
A very interesting question. Perhaps I can’t answer it because I have the wrong plumbing….lol.
This probably is part of a larger “women in politics” debate.
I’m always surprised that women aren’t that political. I guess I was raised by a political junkie and assume most women are that way.
As for the feminine blog–I confess to having flowers normally. I just happen to be redesigning it under a different domain right now. When you’re named “girl from the South” there has to be a plantation house, hoop skirt or flower somewhere. However, most blogs aimed at women have cutesy clip art or florals. Mommyblogs always seem to have graphics of kids. There’s obviously a market for them, or they wouldn’t be designed.
I’ve never thought about gender and blogging before this. I read blogs that are well-written and interesting. When I stumble upon another blog written by a conservative woman, I guess I feel comraderie. However, I don’t purposely seek those out.
Even though I’m an educated woman, I usually roll my eyes at feminism and gender inequalities. As a conservative, I wish that we could eliminate quotas and special interests and operate by merit, but that’s never going to happen.
Perhaps the reason you roll your eyes is because you’re automatically equating feminism and gender inequality with “quotas and special interests.” The two are not one and the same. People can (and do, often) point out or study or comment on or critique gender difference and inequalities and gaps, and theorize about why these exist and what to do about them, without ever suggesting that there need to be quotas to correct these. I too wish we could eliminate quotas and operate solely by merit … which in no way diminishes my position as a feminist.
Anyway, as for gender and blogging …. I think it all depends. You point out that a lot of female bloggers intersprerse current event bloggings with craft, shopping, and gossip stories. Some do, sure. I don’t. A lot of female bloggers I read don’t. I don’t think any of this is good or bad, one way or the other. Men may be less likely to read “feminine” blogs, but even though some women will read, say, sports or car blogs, I’m pretty sure they’re in the minority.
I think all of that is kind of a non-issue in the blogging world. Where it gets interesting is with political blogs. Digby being a man nonwithstanding, there are certainly many more male political bloggers. Why? And why are male bloggers more likely to focus on hard politics (defense, budgets, health policy, campaigns) while women are more likely to focus on “soft politics” (social issues, family issues, cultural issues)? I think women feel intimidated by the harder issues in ways men don’t, but why or where this comes from, I don’t know. Or maybe women just write more about the “soft politics” issues because they don’t feel that politics as a whole pays attention enough to these issues, and if they don’t write about them, nobody will. It’s an interesting question all around. But I don’t think it should be confined to the blogosphere. I mean, the blogosphere makes a nice little petri dish to study this sort of thing, but I think everything you see here by way of men/women/politics is symptomatic of culture as a whole.
Sorry for the book-length reply
Sorry Elyzabethe. I’m just not a feminist, nor will I ever be. I usually find gender equality issues boring. I guess when you add the word blog, my interest is piqued.
Women may focus on the “soft issues” because that’s what affects us. We all have a passing interest in the military and defense for our own safety, but that issue requires a lot of background knowledge. Unless you have a keen interest in the topic, you aren’t going to write about it on your blog.
People on an average care about 3, perhaps 5, issues in politics. That’s probably what bloggers write about. We become little experts in certain fields. If the topic doesn’t interest us or affect us, we’re not going to blog about it.
In “Linguistics” a book by Deborah Tanner, she studied the collaborative versus competitive behavior of very young children. Little girls collaborate. They work to ensure the inclusion of all in the group. Little boys compete for top position, and establish a ranking.
What does soft politics mean? Medical treatment is a soft issue? Or is it that inclusiveness trumps rank in those issues? Women avoid taking the hard line that says kill them if they don’t play according to the leader’s law. Or is soft just another way of saying less important than our ability to kick their ass and enforce our law there as well as here.
Sobi
adrienne, I didn’t say you had to call yourself a feminist; just that feminism does not = whining for quotas
I don’t know. A lot of feminist are rather whiney.
Perhaps it’s the label, but for some reason I abhor all things feminist. Even Feminists for Life bother me.
Can I be a token-okay-feminist like you’re a token-okay-republican to us?
Doesn’t the group need a token member of everything?
Can I ask why you find the topic of gender inequality so boring? And can I ask what you define as a feminist? The history of feminism is so complex and cloudy…everyone’s interpretation of feminism is different. I know I’m veering off course with these questions, but I’m just curious to why you “abhor all things feminist” and what defined your terms of feminism (a course at school, etc.)
That’s a big question, Tanzaniajue. Let me organize my thoughts and I’ll post something about it later.
It’s beyond the “well, I’m a conservative, and Rush said not to like them” defense.
Oops, I know…BIG question. HA! Well…for another happy hour conversation.
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