Women, Geeks, and the Blogosphere

David Weinberger informs us that the first BlogHer Conference will occur this July, in Santa Clara, CA. This "first of its kind" conference hopes to provide an opportunity for the female blogging community to meet in person. In addition, the organizers plan to focus the event on the following ill-structured problems:

1. Discuss the role of women within the larger blog community 2. Examine the developing (and debatable) code of blogging ethics 3. Discover how blogging is shrinking the world and amplifying the voices of women worldwide

Now, anyone who's been following the evolution of the blogosphere will note that the two questions that will not die are absent from the list. Those missing questions are, of course, "Where are all of the female bloggers?(a really stupid, but persistent question)", and, "Why aren't there more female a-list bloggers?(Not a stupid question... but nevertheless a question that tends to be very toxic to conversations...)"  The organizers of the conference are very wise to avoid those polemic inducing questions for two reasons: Firstly, the questions make unwarranted assumptions. Secondly, the questions tend to neither produce solutions, or greater understanding of situation.

So if ya'll don't mind, I'd like to do my part for the good of the conference, and strike those two questions down. To begin, allow me to answer the question, "where are all the female bloggers?"

->Females make up 56% percent of the blogosphere. Men are, in fact, the minority. (2)

So now that we've established that women are-in-fact-blogging (golly! how swell is that?), we're immediately faced with another question "how come the minority of men dominate the blogosphere?" Now, if this question were asked on a TV show like Crossfire, the wide range of existing opinions would probably be reduced to these two sides:

Opinion 1: Men just make better bloggers then women... obviously this is because they have testicles, are "naturally more competitive and warlike"(1), and have larger hands and broad shoulders (or something... usually this side's argument suffers from a dearth of evidence).

Opinion 2 which differs from Opinion 1: Men are just being men (a.k.a. pigs); in a serious of secret meetings, the steering committee of manliness passed several resolutions to prevent women from succeeding in the blogosphere.

Obviously, most everyone will find these two extremes idiotic... however, even moderate versions of these views are --IMHO -- misguided at best. So, let's consider this issue by asking a different question: "What advantage do men have over women, that might account for their over visibility in the blogosphere?" Have you figured it out? It's right under your nose...

Computer geeks, web designers, developers, and various other nerd-trades -- until recently -- have been overwhelmingly dominated by males. The technology that allows the blogosphere was created by geeks; since they were here first (and indeed, geeks are hugely over-represented in the blogosphere), they've been in a better position to dominate this early period in the evolution of the blogosphere. In my opinion, various social expectations and peer pressure are to blame for the lack of women geeks. Seriously... let us not forget the way almost all of us thought in middle and high school. How many girls dared to be deep geeks (and, by way of common interests, socialize with the geeks)? At my school, I seem to recall only five girls who were deep geeks. All of them were truly astonishing people, for on the one hand, not caring about the very real social consequences of being a female geek, and tolerating the clumsy passes that the male geeks would make on them.

Now, the bright side of this is that technology is becoming more common place; thus the stereotype of "if you can use a computer you are a nerd" is steadily disappearing. In addition, the learning curve for blogging technology is steadily decreasing. Combined, these two trends will almost certainly overpower the early advantage that the geeks (who happen to be overwhelmingly male) had in the blogosphere.

That said, there are a few remaining points I wanted to make. Firstly, in regards to there being a lack of a-list female bloggers. In order for a blogger to gain a mass audience, they must appeal our more vulgar, and reptilian-brained interests. Basically, the content has to be television-ized; for, as someone once pointed out, people tend to be very similar in what vulgarities they find interesting; but when it comes to their noble and enlightened interests, they tend to be wildly different. Most of the female bloggers that I know will never become a-list bloggers for the following reasons:

a) They already have jobs that pay a lot better than even the most succesful full time blogging gig.

b) Have a tendency not to compromise their integrity and morality for the sake of appealing to a mass audience.

c) Recognize that in a many-to-many medium, a high quality audience is much more rewarding, both intellectually, and emotionally, than a large mediocre one (if you don't believe me just read the comment threads at Wizbang).

I'm not claiming that those reasons are a "female thing" -- they are just my personal observations.

On a final note, this whole debate fails to bring up one of the most beautiful aspects of the blogosphere: who gives a crap whether a blogger is male or female? This whole special attention that has been given to females and blogs seems almost sexist to me. For example, read just one post from Citizen’s Rent, Rebecca Mackinnon, Rox Populi, IddyBud and Feministe. The first thing you’ll notice is how wonderfully diverse, intelligent, and entertaining this independent form of commentary we call "the weblog" can be. Then, you might notice that all of those posts happen to have been written by women.

However, clearly, the greater lesson is that you can’t just lump bloggers together like insects and say “female bloggers face this challenge…” or, “female bloggers tend to…[whatever]”. Re-read those five bloggers and try – just try – to come up with one generalization about them that rings true; and has nothing to do with their gender. In addition, this might be a good time to reconsider the assumption that males have the sufficient power or "natural ability"to sabatoge or interfer with the rise of these voices.

Notes:

BTW, a few of you got a rather bizarre storm of trackbacks as a result of civicspace's buggy automatic trackback detection feature. The inappropriate trackbacks were not intentional; I have turned off the auto-detection to prevent this from problem occuring again. And, sorry for the slight mess.

1. Anyone with eyes and a brain knows that idea of women being naturually peaceful and cooperative as opposed to competitive is complete crap. 

2. " One study published in “Into the Blogosphere,” a collection of scholarly materials covering blogging, looked at a sample of media coverage of bloggers and found that male bloggers were mentioned 88 percent of the time and women bloggers just 12 percent. Is that because more men are blogging? Not according to a 2003 study by Perseus Development Corporation, which estimated that 56 percent of blogs are created by women. " -[excerpt from article in Minnestoa Women's Press]