..because when the New York Times writes about women and blogging they put it in the Style and Fashion section, not business or politics!!!!!!!!
Hat Tip to The F-Word, who tipped Every Dot Connects, who picked up the 'story' from The Brand Box.
As Every Dot Connects says:
"Well, hello! Yes, there’s a glass ceiling. And instead of addressing the question, the New York Times editors are part of the problem. A story about men who blog, especially if they had built the kind of powerhouse network the BlogHer folks have, would have run in the business or technology section of the newspaper. But women’s accomplishments in the blogosphere are celebrated in Fashion and Style"FFS etc, etc, etc
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11 comments:
Why am I not surprised?
* rolleyes *
Exactly, jennie, exactly!
I think it was Oscar Wilde that said; "Never trust anything that bleeds for five days and doesn't die." He may have had a point.
You wouldn't find male bloggers in sports section...err...well actually yes in the one of my papers you do get a summary of the Scottish football forums.
Jennie, Jo et al keep your blogs well out of the style and fashion sections, they are so much better than that. :)
One must presume that Devil's Advocate had a rather unhappy childhood - not trusting one's mother must be so traumatising.
On the subject though, it's good to see some new and quite excellent women bloggers coming forward this year. Blogging is a concept which comes easier to men, I suspect, a quick rant and you're off. Women appear to be more achievement-oriented, thus more sceptical of the 'use' of blogging.
It doesn't help that there is a minority of primarily, but not exclusively , male bloggers, whose use of misogynist and/or abusive language tends to discourage women from entering the fray. If, however, we can reach the equivalent 'tipping point' that you referred to in an earlier blog entry about Parliament, maybe that will change.
As for the New York Times, like in most newspapers, so-called 'hard' news is covered by men, the rest by women, which probably explains but doesn't excuse the positioning of the article. We're hardly pure on this ourselves. Check out Regional Officers some time. How many Treasurers are female, for example?...
I can't speak for anyone else here, Mark, but I have been very active on Livejournal since 2004, and it was always 70% female. I ain't a new blogger. Prior to that I was active on a lot of web forums and the only one that wasn't overwhelmingly majority female was the British Horror films forum.
Like I keep saying, it's not that women aren't active on the internet, it's just that men don't notice us.
Stephen,
Hello, nice to see you! But surely your football forums are about sport and therefore have a rational place in the sports pages; if the Blogher event had been about fashion blogging then that would have rationally fitted!
Mark,
That is a very good point you make about regional treasurers and chimes in well with the WLD call for more women to put themselves forward for election for Federal Committees.
You are right to highlight it because if you want to know where the power is then you have to follow the money! If women are more achievement orientated then they will tend towards the action orientated roles rather than the monitor and control type roles such as treasurer.
But jennie is absoluteley right, about 60% of all bloggers are female - but women specifically blogging about politics are much thinner on the ground - and why that is, is very interesting! I fully intend to blog about it one day but today I have to go and achieve a fully updated terms and conditions for who's who online!
I think the key is in differences of style. Women tend to have a blog, in which they blog about EVERYTHING. Men tend to have different blogs for different things, and therefore their blogs are more specific, and easy to market as a specific thing. Even the lovely Mark, who claims in his blog header to blog about whatever he feels like, is 95% politics.
The exception to this gender rule of thumb (oh how I hate that phrase) is fandom role play, which is almost exclusively female, but has little relevance to politics, really...
Like Jennie, I was on Livejournal for years, since moving to Wales in 2002 in fact as initially it was a way to keep in touch with friends from 'back home'. I'm not new, but I did have to consciously scrap most of my personal material and move to a more 'grownup' platform before anyone (besides my preexisting friends) noticed me. I hope now I am attracting a couple of more serious readers, they don't consider me any authority on style and fashion. They're incredibly deluded if they do and if they're not careful will end up walking around in hippy stripey hoodies and neon hair after following my advice... actually come to think of it that might not be a bad old state of affairs!
Jennie: is my house completely backwards then? Because my 6ft3 male and decidedly male other half is a total otaku and spends his time on cosplay forums and watching endless streaming episodes of Bleach and Naruto while I blog about politics!
My house is backwards too ;) I've been calling Mat "wife" for ages. The customers at the pub think it's hilarious.
BTW, I dunno if you have seen this already (probly you have) but the beeb have covered the story too, in a slightly different way to the NYT.
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