 Researching
this article has been a nightmare. The data is suspect and contradictory.
There are dozens of explanations for the anomolies, some of them quite
absurd. Last fall there was a huge
discussion of this issue. But I thought the subject was interesting and
I needed something less grim than yesterday's topic, so here we are. If
you want to read what transpired in last year's exchange (perhaps more
heat than light), or how it's recently started up again, here are the
key links:
- Dawn Olsen and Meryl Yourish get the debate started (Sep./02)
- Ginger Stampley's
large collection of links to follow-ups to the above posts, including
posts by Brigitte Eaton (EatonWeb), Shelley Powers (Burningbird), Liz
Lawley (Mommabear), Ampersand (Alas a Blog), Jeanne d'Arc (Body &
Soul) and a few male interlopers (Sep.-Oct./02)
- Lisa Guernsey (a Salon blogger who wrote about this in the NYT) (Nov./02)
- Large comment thread on the above NYT article on Blogroots including some interesting comments from Rebecca Blood (Nov.-Dec./02)
- Halley Suitt -- her new post laments and questions why fewer than 10 of the 100 most blogrolled blogs are written by women (Oct./03)
- Dave Weinberger publicizes Halley's post, leading to a rash of comments, including a comment and a followup post from our own Rayne (Oct./03)
- Misbehaving.net, a wonderful all-women blog about technology, adds more reader comments (Oct./03)
The now-notorious Perseus blog survey produces some data:
- more than half of all blog authors are women, and they persevere longer and write more
- probably fewer than one million of the more than four
million blogs that have been started are still active (another million
only lasted one day),
- the number of blogs started doubles every year (ten million will be started next year),
- fewer then one in ten active blogs is updated more than once a week (and fewer than one in twenty is updated daily),
- the median age of bloggers is eighteen ("the typical blog
is written by a teenage girl who uses it twice a month to update her
friends and classmates on happenings in her life").
While some of these data are questionable (Radio, Moveable Type and
TypePad blogs were not included), it would still seem likely that women
do produce more than
half the content of the blogosphere, but make up no more than 15% of
blogrolls. So is the blogosphere sexist, and if so, how and why?
Just a note on methodology: BlogStreet's Top 100 Most Influential list
(the one that has stirred up the latest controversy) is computed
formulaically by adding up the total number of 'inbound blogs' (blogs
that have the target blog on their blogroll) and then weighting each 'inbound blog' by the number of 'inbound blogs' to it.
So if an A-lister blogrolls you that counts for much more in the
rankings than being blogrolled by an 'unknown'. This recursive process
reinforces the strength of large cliques and, I would submit, distorts
the results. But if you look at the simpler unweighted 'Top 100' list,
which still uses 'inbound blogs' as its measure but weights them all
equally, the number of women on the list isn't significantly higher.
Here's my take on all this:
- While there are many notable
exceptions, blogs authored by men are much more likely to be about
politics (especially conservative politics), or about technology, and
to be narrowly focused (a few easily categorizable subjects). There are many netizens whose interest is
narrow and focused on politics or technology, and these people are
therefore more likely to blogroll a small number of blogs authored
mostly by men.
- Although again there are many exceptions, men tend
to blog more about external events (rather than personal ones).
External events, being in the public domain, are more likely to be
Googled, which means that Googlers are more likely to find (and
presumably then blogroll) male bloggers than female ones.
- Shirky's Law says the race is to the quick -- the first
person blogging on a particular subject is likely to dominate that
'space' and if it turns out to be a hot subject, get blogrolled by a
lot of people. There is evidence that men tend to get on bandwagons
sooner than women -- men were the first to set up blogs that were
exclusively focused on Dean, Clark, SARS, The Matrix, Lord of the
Rings, and Harry Potter, for example, and late-comers to these causes
(presumably half of them women) are, per Mr. Shirky, unlikely to ever
catch up in popularity to the first 'guy' on board.
- People tend to remove blogs from blogrolls more reluctantly
and slowly than they add them. Therefore, there may be many 'inbound
links' that were added on impulse because they covered a hot topic, and
are now stale, no longer used, but which still count on Technorati and
BlogStreet Top 100 popularity rankings. To show what this may entail,
consider that women make up 38% of the top 50 Salon Blogs when ranked
by number of monthly visitors, but only 26% of the top 50 when ranked
by number of inbound blogs.
- I just went through my own blogroll and found that 65% of
the Salon blogs and 70% of the non-Salon blogs on it are by men. But I
know for a fact that I tend to hit the women's blogs on my blogroll
more often than the men's, mainly because I find them more consistently
well-written and (due in part to their variety, imagination, and
personal stories) more interesting. Again, there are notable
exceptions. And you know what? About a third of the blogs on my
blogroll were brought to my attention or recommended to me by someone other
than their owner. Two thirds of these 'third-party recommended' blogs
are authored by men. I can't say for sure, but I would estimate that at
least half of the recommendations came from women.
- Some blogs are on my blogroll because their owners
were aggressive in telling me about their blogs. They tend to be about
60% male-authored. I'm sure the only thing that would surprise you
about this is that the percentage isn't higher than that. Guys just
tend to be more full of themselves.
- Men seem to find reading stuff by other men more
interesting. Women tend to read more than men, but seem to find writing
by both genders equally interesting. I base this on an unscientific straw poll of
everyone I observed during my last three airplane trips. It showed 40% of women
but only 20% of men had books on board, and the authors of the books
read by women were about half male, while the authors of the books read
by men were all male. Add to
that the fact that, of the 200 bloggers on the Blogging Ecosystem with
blogrolls over 100 blogs long, about 60% were authored by men, i.e. men
have on average longer blogrolls.
And finally, once the power curve is established, and male-dominated,
it is, as it is in all other spheres, including business, politics, and
journalism, self-perpetuating. To break into the A-list you usually
need to get noticed and linked to by an A-lister. Guess which gender is
more likely to benefit from that? To that extent, the blogosphere becomes unconsciously sexist. But it isn't to begin with -- it's the seven phenomena above that set the stage.
Most importantly, we need better measures of blog popularity and quality,
measures that better identify great new bloggers (and great one-off
posts) by some electronic analogue of 'word-of-mouth'. If you can come
up with such measures, I guarantee that the people at Technorati and
BlogStreet would love to produce the data. And I think many bloggers of
both sexes would use them. With time at a premium, the blogosphere
would quickly embrace mechanisms that would help us find great writing
and bloggers of like minds in ways less serendipitous, and less subject
to the vagaries of Shirky's Law, than the ones we must rely on now.
|
MADE IN CANADA
trust your
instincts 
