I threw a few more questions at poor xian on Saturday, offline, regarding the dearth of women in the “100 Most Influential Blogs”:

• What are the ages of the authors of the "Top 100"?  of the Top 100 women?  I have a suspicion there's something to this;

• Is there too much of the "good girl" pressure to perform at a particular level as a writer before beginning to blog?  (I've run into that already this week with a gifted artist -- she's afraid to write on the internet even though she's brave enough to perform live.  What's with that?)

• How many of the Top 100 bloggers were published writers already, before blogging or coincident with blogging?  In the fields in which they write, assuming they were published, is/was there a similar representation?

Even the label “influential” begs for qualification – does this mean most read or most social impact?  Would the Reverse Cowgirl have been on this list only a few months ago?

This situation begs for more data, a survey of some sort; there are more cultural issues that affect the distribution we see.  Without more data a rational and credible explanation will be difficult to achieve. 

Anybody out there have more demographics on bloggers?

12:53:05 PM    comment []