Summary
This study examined gender inequity among the most-read political blogs on the Web. Sampling over one year from blog rankings, we found that 10% of the top bloggers were women. Discourse analysis of bloggers' explanations for gender disparity revealed three dominant beliefs: women do not blog about politics, women's blogs lack quality, and top bloggers do not link to women's sites. We use network and feminist theory to explore these claims and offer suggestions for increasing the representation of female voices in the political Blogosphere.
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Extract
The Gendered Blogosphere: Examining Inequality Using Network and Feminist Theory
The Pew Internet and American Life Project documented a 58% rise in blog readership during 2004.1 Among Internet users, 27% of American adults or 32 million people reported reading blogs. This is about 40% the size of the talk radio audience and 20% that of newspapers.2 Blogs are web-based commentaries in diary form. They come in many varieties, from the highly personal to those focusing primarily on political and social issues. The latter, referred to by Herring and others as filter blogs,3 offer an alternative means for entering into a public discourse and participating in the political sphere.
A cursory look, however, at the blogs receiving the most links according to blog indexers suggests a disproportionate number of male writers. This dominance within the virtual political space mimics existing material and legitimized political spaces in U.S. politics-from editorial pages of American newspapers to state and federal legislative halls, men dominate. But, because one can enter the political blogosphere with relatively little social, political, and economic capital, one might expect greater gender equality. The reasons this has not happened are the focus of this study.We first seek to test conventional wisdom: Are few of the top political bloggers women? If this is true, the question then becomes, "Why?" The discrepancy cannot be because women are not online; in 2004, the Pew Internet and American Life Project found that 66% of men and 61% of women use the Internet.4 Access is not simply a matter of technology but also depends on motivation and interest in the content being produced and consumed.5 But even for blog authorship the disparity is not great, with 57% of blogs written by men and 43% by women.6 So, women do blog. But parity at...See the full content of this document
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