Gender Differences In the Blogosphere

We had to read an article THE GENDERED BLOGOSPHERE: EXAMINING INEQUALITY USING NETWORK AND FEMINIST THEORY which discussed what propotion of political bloggers were women. They took samples over a one year course and found out that a mere 10% of political bloggers were women. The reasons that they gave for this were 1. Women simply don't blog about politics, 2. Women's blogs lack quality and 3. The most popular blogs do not link to women's blogs.

It is pretty obvious that politics has been a "men's world" for as long as we've known it, so it's not very surprising to see a lack of women political bloggers. I personally do not have much of an interest in politics so this doesn't really shock or effect me much.

The second reasoning they give, that women's blogs lack quality, seems a bit absurd. However, I would agree that if women are blogging they tend to add their own opinions and feelings into the blog more often than men do. This may be an off putting thing in a blog if someone is trying to find hard facts about a political issue. The reader would not want to have to wade through 3 paragraphs of the writers personal opinion.

Lastly, the linking hierarchy that has been created by men. As previously discussed, we know that "info snacking" is the new way to surf the web. Therefore, if the most popular blogs are linking to other blogs, those blogs will then get tons of traffic sent to their site. Now if men are only linking to other men, it pushes the women's blogs even further down into the abyss that is the internet. Women can help change this by only linking to other women, however that could greatly affect the quality of their blog.

In the end, perhaps with the times changing and the prospective of more women in politics grows so will the appearance of women political bloggers.