Females: Blogged Off
by Charlie Tims
The passing of March 25th sees what I think is the first calendar month without an entry on the blog by a female. Back in Feburary in our anniversary blogged debate about how blogging had changed us, women notably didn't participate. So, why is this blog so male dominated? Is it to do with the nature of blogs, the type of things we post or something festering in the heart of politics? I seem to recall somebody sending round a link to a website that could deduce your gender from your sentence construction. Nine times out of ten it seemed to guess correctly. Could it be that we've created a critical mass of one type of gender speak that alienates another?
Paul Paul
Perhaps bloggers should conceal their names (and gender) to protect the innocent.
gillian gillian
i agree with what lydia says, esp about the blog not really fulfilling a role where ideas can be tested and debated before they are fully formed.
Commenting also seems quicker than posting, which helps.
More than this seems to involve a greater element of performance, which i'm not that interested in when what i'm really looking for is stimulus/chat/fluidity etc in the five minutes between tasks. wouldn't have thought this was a gender thing, but i guess the stats speak for themselves.
interesting to know if other blogs have this too.
Lydia Lydia
I work at Demos and I hardly ever post on the blog (although I do quite often comment). I've tried analysing why not and although I'm not that convinced by my own cod-psychology I've come up with a number of possible reasons/excuses:
1) I'm not very technically literate and I always forget how to post to the blog (my links never seem to work) and I'm a bit embarrassed to keep asking. Pathetic but true.
2) I'm not very keen to instigate debates or conversations by posting but I do enjoy reading and commenting. I make no apology for being a passive participant, but my only other observation would be that I'm far more likely to read and comment if a posting already has comments attached to it.
3) There have been a few occassions (fairly limited in number I admit) when the responses to a posting have been very aggressive. People have been called 'stupid' and worse for posting items that were potentially controversial but were posted in the spirit of an open discussion. The consequence being that they were shot down in flames.
I don't think there have been sinister gender dimensions to these incidents (men and women have both dished out and received nasty comments) but if I wanted to generate a discussion around an area in which I wasn't either extremely knowledgable or confident, I'd much prefer to do it within a face-to-face context. I think on-line discusssion forums are quicker to degenerate into out-and-out hostility than off-line ones.
My conclusion, therefore, is that rather than the blog being a space where you can test out and debate ideas BEFORE formulating a position, quite often the reverse is true. Blogs don't seem to be a very satisfactory forum for putting forth tentative suggestions that might be a bit controversial as, on the few instances where this has happened, it was the abuse rather than constructive debate that dominated the ensuing discussion.