[Air-l] women bloggers - data
Jan Schmidt
aoir at schmidtmitdete.de
Mon Jun 11 01:58:56 PDT 2007
Hi Paul, hi all,
to add some empirical date to this interesting discussion:
As others have pointed out already, women are not underrepresented in
the blogosphere per se, but in the blogosphere that is most visible,
that is the a-list and/or blogs which might be cited by journalists as
"typical blogs". I've done some research on the German blogosphere which
has a similar structure of attention/publicity as other blogospheres:
There is a relatively small group of blogs that get a lot of
visits/links (a-list), and the long tail which goes down to blogs with
only a few, if any, readers.
In a large-scale quantitative surveys I've conducted in 2005, there were
about 45% women and 55% men among active bloggers; a content analysis
done by colleagues of mine (who drew a random sample of german-speaking
blogs) had even higher figures for female bloggers (about 65%).
We recently checked the german a-list by looking at the 180+ blogs which
made the "Deutsche Blogcharts" in 2006
(http://www.deutscheblogcharts.de; a top 100 list based on
Technorati-Data, i.e. measuring popularity through inbound links). Of
those, 61 % are run by individual male bloggers, 13% by individual
female bloggers, 23% are group blogs (of which, again, 25 percent are
run by a group of men and 71 percent by a mixed-gender group); 3 percent
didn't give any information on the gender of the author. So women are
highly underrepresented in this highly visible segment of the german
blogosphere.
We haven't looked in detail into the topics these top-blogs cover, but
I'd say that a higher share of men than of women is blogging about
topics that might attract more readers (e.g. IT, media, reflections on
the state of the blogosphere itself, ...), thus giving these male blogs
a higher visibility - and, subsequently, shaping the "public image" of
blogs! The discourses about the potentials of blogs as well as
banalization discourses both within and outside the blogosphere are
implicitly gendered, I'd argue - see also the seminal Herring et al 2004
[http://blog.lib.umn.edu/blogosphere/women_and_children.html].
As a last remark: Interestingly we found in a study of a popular
german-speaking blog hoster (www.twoday.net), that centrality WITHIN
this particulaer platform blog community correlates with gender: Highly
central blogs on the platform are more likely to be run by women, and
they tend to be of an "public online-journal style" (rather than
focussing on political commentary or filtering).
Right now, these findings have only been published in german - but in
case you're interested in copies, just send me a private E-Mail.
Best, Jan
Has anyone on this list come across data or reflections on the apparent
under-representation of women in the blogosphere?
paul teusner
fishers, surfers and casters - http://teusner.org/
bio - http://paulteusner.org/
--
Jan Schmidt
Obere Sandstr. 9
96049 Bamberg
+49 (951) 500 9014
+49 (177) 520 5199
jan.schmidt at bnv-bamberg.de
http://www.bamberg-gewinnt.de/wordpress
--
Jan Schmidt
Obere Sandstr. 9
96049 Bamberg
+49 (951) 500 9014
+49 (177) 520 5199
jan.schmidt at bnv-bamberg.de
http://www.bamberg-gewinnt.de/wordpress
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