[Air-l] women bloggers - data

[Jan Schmidt]

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