chicken chicks?
Further to Maxine's post at Three Point Turn on the lack of female political bloggers in the NZ clique, and my own consternation on the same point many months ago, here's a wee bit of analysis.
From my blogroll of the nz politics types (by no means exhaustive) we have:
Women 3 (all left)
Men 35 (21 left, 11 right, 3 centre)
Team blogs with women 4 (2 left, 1 right, 1 centre)
Team blogs with no women 3 (2 left, 1 right)
Total number blogs 45
So as a percentage there are only 15.6% (to 1 dp) have a female perspective. This does seem startlingly low. Particularly, imho, the lack of women on the right until Maxine started blogging quite recently. Of course I am ignoring the "professional" bloggers, i.e. journos and politicians who have blogs as I just don't read them, with the exception of Hard News.
But the real question here is why?
Some people (men) have postulated that women aren't interested in politics, (tell that to the PM, incoming Speaker, etc). I think this is a pretty old fashioned view of the divide between public and private that really shouldn't have escaped the 1950s.
Others seem to think women aren't as into the rough and tumble of blog debate. And yet there are frequently women commenting on DPF's blogs who don't have blogs (or at least don't have political ones). Why are they commenters but not bloggers?
I'm stumped, but if the nz blogosphere is to have a future as an important place for political debate then we need to get a bit more diverse, and not just in terms of gender either.
10 comments:
We could make David Farrar an honourary right-wing girl.
Oh hang on, he hits on girls half his age, forget that.
cos women already rule our world. see my blog for list
I think political blogging is generally male dominated. its not just in New Zealand- but I can't say I've exhaustively researched it.
I'm not a huge fan of gender stereotyping either- but one of the other on-line communities I lurk on the fringes of is one for parents of children born in the same month of the same year as mine. We all were pregnant together, we shared birth stories, we continue to share info and stories as we move on to the toddler stage. And there is not a single male participant. That might have been fair enough at the pregnancy stage but its not like only women do the parenting thereafter. Where the men? Don't they want to ask about toddler tantrums etc? I can only remember one post from a man which was a question about what he could do to cheer his wife up when she was down because none of her clothes fit.
When we started our blog I made sure we had a female onboard. Blogs like flats can get ugly with out a clean living girl. We tend to leave posts growing for weeks in the corner.
I wish some of these people would blog more on politics, but here are some non-left female bloggers you might have missed:
http://tamiam.blogspot.com/
http://this-chick.com/
http://hannahroseincyberworld.blogspot.com/
http://vilefile.blogspot.com/
http://awesomegirl.typepad.com/
http://excruciatinglycorrectbehaviour.blogspot.com/
Blogging is the new rock&roll, a.k.a. boys stuff to attract chicks (this time attempting to be attractive for their brains rather than for their socks down their trousers)
thanks for the other suggestions - especially Portia - the rest aren't really "political" imho, but will definitely visit those i wasn't already :-) (i do have Vile File, and the excellent MTNW but didn't put my non-political blogs into the equation)
i don't think it can be as simple as more men being puter nerds. i know plenty of female puter nerds and for the record i'm not one, never have been. also from what i know of stef she isn't one either, and neither is Kate from About Town.
surely it can't be about attracting girls either - a lot of the male bloggers seem to be gay...
perhaps it's about the use of written rather than spoken communication? (can you tell i'm grasping at straws?)
I think you probably can't answer the question without getting into the area of why in general men and women tend to do different things (in a behavioral sense rather than a physiological one). Which is where it all starts to get a bit too complicated.
You may know plenty of women who are involved in geekery. But I believe you'll find that they're outweighed by a substantially larger number of men (which, given that the men are computer geeks may be what puts women off... but I digress), a suggestion which can be confirmed by a stroll through almost any computer science facility. This article discusses this gender gap from an Australian perspective - the female participation levels in tertiary level IT that the author refers to are not dissimilar to the female blogging participation levels you have identified.
Whether these differences are due to endemic sexism in IT, to women being conditioned that this is a male genre, or to innate differences in what things in general the sexes are interested in (rather than capable of), is a question for a greater mind. It could be a combination of all three. Having said that, I'd put a bit of money on the sexism bit. I think it would be quite easy to objectify women when you've never (or rarely) met one in a social context...
You don't need to be a computer geek to be a blogger. But before Blogger and Movable Type came along, it sure helped (and for a lot of people it's still all a bit esoteric). So this is not the only explanation for the gender imbalance. But I think it might be at least part of the story.
I refuse to believe that jarrod is posting something serious. somebody has stolen has name.
span I have evened things up on the "extreme" front on blog.
Larry Summers at Harvard had a point. Men and women are wired differently. much as I would like my daughters to be rough and technical they are just different.
It definitely does not make either inferior that they have different preferences. So women are not genreally so vain as to believe that somebody else is interested in their opinions. is that a strength or a weakness?
SageNZ,
I've been taking my medication* lately, and have been feeling much more lucid. The prospect of returning to New Zealand permanently has also calmed the nightmare visions that perpetually reside in my tiny, fevered, brain.
Cheers
Jarrod
*Note: medication = booze
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