On the first page of the Marketplace section of the Wall St. Journal today there is an article about blogging that is of great interest to anyone who considers herself an active blogger: No Day at the Beach: Bloggers Struggle with What to do about Vacation (see this link if you don’t have an online WSJ subscription). The article explores a topic near and dear to our hearts – what happens to our blogs when we go on vacation? Many us just end up bringing our laptop along, lest we risk losing our regular site visitors.
Important topic. At least to us bloggers.
The problem? Let me see, out of the eight bloggers mentioned – Andrew Sullivan, John Amato, Jim Romenesko, Mark Lisanti, Jeff Jarvis, Kevin Drum, David Weigel, and Michelle Malkin, only one of them is a woman. What’s up with that? Here we have a medium where it has been documented that there are at least as many women blogging as men, the writer, Elizabeth Holmes, doesn’t bother to scratch beneath the surface of the Technorati top 100 to bring her article into some semblance of balance. Heck, she could have at least interviewed Heather Armstrong of Dooce. Dear Ms. Holmes, The Technorati 100 is not even remotely representative of those of us who blog. Those sites may get a lot of press attention, but even Technorati’s CEO David Sifry would point out that those top 100 blogs only represent a tiny fraction of the blogging activity on this planet. Given the length of the long tail of blogging, there is so much more of interest going on outside of the top 100 than within, I encourage you to look a little deeper the next time you want to talk about bloggers. Heck, with over 19,000 feed subscribers, my little food blog gets more traffic than many of the Technorati 100. That I can assure you. Please. Next time provide a little more balance in your reporting. And if you happen to want to learn more about some great blogs written by women, stop by BlogHer.org.
Uh… I’m not sure if you noticed, but all of those blogs have to do with political/national events issues, whereas Dooce (who is a wonderful blogger) writes about her personal life. Her going on vacation is, by nature of her blog concept, much less of a problem to readers.
What’s interesting about the argument you present here is that you’re angry at a woman for skipping gender and going to the (theoritically) non-gender-biased measure of the Technorati 100.
I’m honestly curious here – are you saying that balance in an article like this couldn’t be achieved unless there was a 50/50 male/female split of the bloggers she used as support for the point she was making?
Again, I honestly have a hard time following the logic. She picks a series of high profile bloggers who get a ton of traffic to their respective sites and quotes them on the subject of the article.
Do you believe that had she interviewed mostly women rather than men, the direction of her article would have shifted?
If so, why?
If not, isn’t that the very definition of sexism?
Maybe as a man I’m simply not capable of understanding the issue here. I try and I want to help achieve equality, no question. But this line of thinking (equality = a constant 50/50 split, simply to maintain a 50/50 split) confuses me more than motivates me.
Hi Jake,
Thank you for your comment.
The point of Ms. Holme’s article is that it is difficult for bloggers to go on vacation from their blogs, without risking losing readership and revenue.
Heather earns a living for her family with Dooce. I imagine that much of her traffic is to her new posts as she has a huge readership, and she suffers the same loss in page views and revenue as any of the other bloggers mentioned when she goes on vacation.
Regarding the non-gender bias of the Techorati 100. There is no technical bias, but there is a historical bias. The tech field is top heavy with men. When it comes to blogging, most of the early bloggers were men, just by nature of the technology used to blog. So, they developed the readership and the links that would propel one into the Technorati 100. I do believe that over time we will see many more women in the Technorati 100, as the tools get easier to use and women get more comfortable in the medium.
Regarding balance, I’m not asking for a 50/50 split, just better than 12/88. Also, there’s a lot more going on in the blogosphere than just political reporting. Her article makes it seem like blogging=writing about politics, which it doesn’t.
If she had written an article about blogging, with the same premise, and had used 7 women and only one man as examples, I think that would be really weird too. It would seem just as out of balance to me as her article is now.
What I’m asking is for journalists to look a little deeper than the Technorati 100 if they want to write about “bloggers”.
Thanks for the note, I’m still having a hard time understanding why the concern. Yes, historial bias, cultural bias, and lots of other stuff goes into the overall differences in the tech industry, and the Technorati 100.
But my point is more basic – in this case, why does it matter? If there had been 1000 women interviewed/quoted, the content of the article wouldn’t have fundamentally changed, right? The point would still have been that going on vacation is hard on bloggers. Why does it matter where the quotes came from? (Again, unless you are making the point that women interviewees would have taken the article in a different direction)
Hi Jake,
You’re right, it shouldn’t matter. But it does.
It matters in the same the way that it matters that teachers call on boys more often than girls in classrooms and have to make an extra effort to give equal air time to girls.
It matters because although I have spent my entire professional adult life in a world (technology) that is utterly dominated by men, that in the one place where it isn’t, namely blogging, the boys still get most of the attention.
It matters because when you focus all of your attention on one gender, it sends a message to the world that this is the only gender that counts.
It matters because I am a long time Wall St. Journal subscriber, both in print and on web, I don’t even consider myself a feminist, and this article bugs even me.
It matters because we all do this without even thinking, myself included. I wrote an article a while back about business blogging and passed it to a friend to review. Her response to me was that all 10 case studies I mentioned were sites by men, none by women. I hadn’t even noticed. I had to dig deeper to find more examples that were by women, but the result was actually a more interesting, better balanced article.
Even in a recent article by Food and Wine magazine on food blogging, where 80% of the bloggers are women, 6 out of the 7 blogs cited were by men.
I’m just fed up with it.
I’m not trying to belabor the point here, but I find a few points worth commenting on.
- I read somewhere (sorry, can’t recall where) that actually boys are NOT getting called on more, which is why they’re getting less time from teachers on average than girls. This is one of the key issues, apparently, that is causing such deep discussion of co-ed vs. single sex education.
- You say that your article was better because you balanced it with more women. But is that actually the case? Can you say that it’s because of women and not the additional research you had to take on when you realized the imbalance?
- I’m very very intrigued why it is that blogging, a mostly gender-neutral environment (i.e. you can’t tell the gender unless you’re told), you still feel like there’s some type of inherent bias. In all seriousness here, if the playing field is level, and the environment is balanced, why are men getting recognized more? And is that actually true? Are men perhaps doing a certain type of blogging that gets more news article type attention more than what woman a writing about? (I’m not saying they are, I’m just incredibly intrigued)
Again, not meaning to belabor the point here, but I’m very intrigued. And since women tell me that I just don’t get it, how am I supposed to learn (and thus help change things) if I can’t ask the questions?
Hi Jake,
Part of the reason of the bias is what I already mentioned in a comment above. More men have been blogging longer. They’ve had more time to rise to the top of Technorati, which is the list that journalists see when they want to write an article. Unless they do deeper digging, which is my request.
There is a snowball effect going on here. The more attention someone has, the more they get.
OK, wanted to sleep on the response to your last comment so I could chew it over a bit.
If your point is to dig beyond the current top 100, I would render a guess that that’s not an issue of male/female, it’s an issue of spreading the wealth.
If the Technorati 100 was all women, would you be satisified or would you be saying the same thing about digging deeper?
If the answer is “yes”, then making the issue a gender discussion seems a bit misdirected. There is absolutely NOTHING that restricted women from blogging just as early as men. Sure, the fact that the tech community is far too skewed towards men certainly played a part in the men starting, and other men (and women) propegating their positions.
Here’s the easy solution though – rather than blog about how some reporter didn’t see pass the T100, drop the reporter a mail with a few key suggestions that may have be more interesting. Reporters (as you likely know) are always crunched for time. Help them create a new “easiest solution”.
Anyway, I’ll let this go now. Thanks for the terrific discussion.
Another comment on why it matters. In a post I wrote yesterday I said this:
“Diversity of population results in diversity of perspective and experience and imagination. I believe this is so, and I believe it matters.”
This applies not only to gender, of course, but cuts across many many other layers of human identity.
People like to talk about the opportunity for “meritocracy” or “level playing field” presented by the Internet and the ever-lowering of the economic bar required to get on the Internet.
Won’t mean a thing if all we ever continue to read, see, or hear about is the same old guard.
Dear Elise;
Your post takes my breath away.
And, I’m glad I had not read it before my commenting on Robert Scoble’s recent (problematic to me) post as I would have been too annoyed to articulate clearly. You might want to read Sarah Blow’s post of the past few days regarding this issue of inequality of human dignity and respect for women. She presents a number of useful questions.
I’m an ancient (relatively fit) guy now, father of eight grown children (3 daughters, 38, 24 & 20) and a tad more than annoyed about this inequality to women… It is a situation that must change.
BTW I admire your graciousness as evidenced in your tactful and thoughtful responses to Robert and Jake.