The Blogosphere Diversity Post You've Been Waiting For

Via Kay Steiger, an Ellen Goodman column on male domination of the political blogosphere, that quotes some good points from a few colleagues and friends. The core point:

I began tracking the maleness of this media last spring while I was a visiting fellow at Harvard's Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics, and Public Policy. An intrepid graduate student created a spreadsheet of the top 90 political blogs. A full 42 percent were edited and written by men only, while 7 percent were by women only. Another 45 percent were edited or authored by both men and women, though the "coed" mix was overwhelmingly male. And, not surprisingly, most male bloggers linked to male bloggers.

This is certainly in line with my experience, but it does raise the obvious question -- not is the progressive political blogosphere male-dominated, but compared to what is it male-dominated? To the congress? To the political media? My sense is that the progressive political blogosphere, though more male than the general population or the Democratic Party's voting base, is less male-dominated than is the "traditional" liberal pundit class. I don't, however, have actual data on this.

I suspect that Garance Franke-Ruta does have the data and I'd be interested in seeing that kind of comparison. When you see something relatively new like the blogosphere it's inevitably going to be touched by broader social currents, including the ones that disadvantage women, but imperfect though it may be is it a step forward or a step backwards? Goodman acknowledges that her column "is the kettle of the MSM -- mainstream media -- calling the pot of the netroots male" but it would be nice to actually know the breakdown.

Comments

Perhaps worth noting that women-centric issues are not, I believe, considered "neutral" issues, and, IME, female bloggers focus of women-centric issues. It's possible that some of the prominence of men in the blogosphere is explained by a wider potential audience. This might be particularly true if men are more likely than women to read political blogs.

Posted by SomeCallMeTim | August 10, 2007 11:52 AM

"...but it does raise the obvious question -- not is the progressive political blogosphere male-dominated, but compared to what is it male-dominated? To the congress? To the political media?"

Or how about to the politically active public, or even the politically-interested-enough-to-actually-go-online-to-read-about-politics community?

Posted by bubba | August 10, 2007 11:55 AM

Does the preponderance of male political bloggers signify something? What? Is it symptomatic of a larger problem? How should that problem be solved?

Please advise.

Posted by James Gary | August 10, 2007 11:58 AM

Bloggers are political junkies. Isn't it possible that, for whatever reason, there are just more male political junkies than women political junkies, and therefore, more guys interested in blogging?

No one looks around at the crowd at a football game and says, "damn, they must be discriminating at the ticket counter." The fact that the crowd is disproportionately male is result of the fact that there are more male football fans out there than female fans.

Posted by A.L. | August 10, 2007 12:05 PM

I'm actually much more interested in how they compiled the "spreadsheet of the top 90 political blogs." How were these measured?

It wouldn't surprise me in the least if metrics for this--especially if they used how often the blog was linked to or blogrolled--favor professional bloggers or others who work in politics or journalism for a living. These blogs are more likely to be affiliated with mainstream political/media institutions.

If we accept the claim that MY and a lot of others have made recently--that blogging is the easiest track to the punditocracy these days--then it's necessary to examine to what extent these "top blogs" are affiliated with the institutions that housed the pundits in the old-media days as well. It might just be that the gender imbalance is actually in the punditocracy, as it's always been, rather than in the truly insurgent part of the netroots.

Posted by D Beth | August 10, 2007 12:16 PM

Not sire how you can take the top 90 political blogs and assign that to the liberal side.

Posted by Rob | August 10, 2007 12:19 PM

Bloggers are political junkies.

If you're talking about political blogs, this is likely true; if you're talking about the people who blog at USS Mariner (baseball) or Dooce (mommyblog) or Uncertain Principles (science blog) or Go Fug Yourself (celebrity nastiness) or Serious Eats (food blogging) or Stereogum (MP3 blog), you might find the answers to be different. Seriously, just because we're talking about political blogs doesn't mean that blogs are all about politics; this is an error that frequently creeps into the conversation that never fails to bug me.

Posted by Steve | August 10, 2007 12:27 PM

If there are widespread gender biases in the linking patterns of male bloggers, then that does constitute a clubby barrier to entry into the bogging world.

However, the sentence:

And, not surprisingly, most male bloggers linked to male bloggers.

is quite vague. Does that mean most male bloggers link to only male bloggers? Or that most male blogger links to predominantly male bloggers? Is the ratio of male to female bloggers to which the typical male blogger links higher, lower or about the same as the ratio of male to female bloggers overall?

Could it be that political blogging, which is typically a somewhat solitary, narcissistic and aggressive activity, just doesn't appeal to as many women as men? I assume men are also over-represented in the world of ham radio operation and competitive dog-fighting.

Posted by Dan Kervick | August 10, 2007 12:32 PM

It used to be a truism that once about every three months the male political bloggers would wonder why there weren't any female political bloggers, the female political bloggers would provide links to about sixty other female political bloggers, there'd be some snark, and three months later another male political bloggers would idly wonder why women just weren't interested in politics.

I suspect, like SCMTim, the problem is mostly that a blog on women's issues, while political, doesn't count as wonky enough and hence doesn't draw the links.

Posted by Cala | August 10, 2007 12:49 PM

No one looks around at the crowd at a football game...

--A.L.

I agree.

I can't imagine a more frictionless "market" than one that depends on link clicks and chosen bookmarks.

Virtually no cost of entry. You're boring, you're gone. You're interesting, you get linked.

This is the purest clash and ferment of ideas in the history of humankind.

That said, if there are more Digbys out there, please let me know! I want to read them!

Posted by Emphyrio | August 10, 2007 12:51 PM

Has Ellen Goodman addressed the lack of diversity in her own medium yet? I count 2 of 8 regular NYTimes columnists, and 2 of 6 regular Boston Globe columnists.

Bloggers are self-selected and as unless they put their moniker on their site (Like Ezra Klein or Matt Yglesias) we wouldn't have a clue that they are men, women, high school students, law professors, etc. We only know Atrios is a man and Digby a women because they finally came out and told us.

Posted by Jinchi | August 10, 2007 12:58 PM

If Ellen Goodman is really worried about this, she could, um, start a blog herself. No?

Posted by cheerful Iconoclast | August 10, 2007 1:23 PM

I don't know where Ellen Goodman's grad student go t his list, but here are the top 15 political blogs according to Technorati:

HuffingtonPost Daily Kos Michelle Malkin Think Progress TreeHugger Crooks and Liars Hot Air Powerline Instapundit LGF TPM Wonkette Townhall Newsbusters NRO Captains Quarters

The overwhelming majority are community blogs and with Arianna Huffington, Michelle Malkin (twice) and Wonkette so highly ranked I find it hard to believe there's a lack of women's voices here.

Posted by Jinchi | August 10, 2007 1:39 PM

If 42% of blogs are written by men, 45% mixed and 7% women, who is writing the other 6%?

Posted by rea | August 10, 2007 1:45 PM

I still fail to understand why a good affirmative action program is called for here. Matthew can just have a "target" (let's not call it a quota) for ratio of male to females linked to, and if he misses the target, he can forfeit some of his salary.

Posted by Al | August 10, 2007 1:54 PM

You're boring, you're gone. You're interesting, you get linked.

Really? You think someone with personal connections, an impressive background, etc. isn't more likely to get linked than someone without those qualities? Or that someone might have a little more incentive/ability to put more effort into being interesting (and getting linked, which requires separate effort) if he gets paid to blog, or wants to do so?

You don't think the blogosphere's a slightly more comfortable place for some people than others?

Hey, Matt, why'd you switch to the Atlantic again?

Posted by D Beth | August 10, 2007 2:24 PM

Hey, Matt, why'd you switch to the Atlantic again?

More money, better benefits. Why else do people switch jobs?

Posted by Matthew Yglesias | August 10, 2007 2:34 PM

If 42% of blogs are written by men, 45% mixed and 7% women, who is writing the other 6%?

They're anonymous like me.

Posted by A.L. | August 10, 2007 2:37 PM

Does the preponderance of male political bloggers signify something? What? Is it symptomatic of a larger problem?

Yes. The problem being, how can a grad student wanker at Harvard's Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics, and Public Policy (yawn) leverage this trivia into something that'll get him/her/it on the first rung of the career ladder that so richly compensates cliche-spouting media wankers like Ellen Goodman.

This "issue" is right up there with flag-burning. It's total bullshit.

Posted by sglover | August 10, 2007 2:50 PM

Matt is right, of course. Without affirmative action programs, males tend to dominate highly competitive intellectual and cultural fields. Take a look at the Academy Award nominations, for example. No woman has ever been nominated in Best Cinematography. Only three nominations for Best Director have ever gone to a woman, under 1% of the total. Even in Screenwriting, the number of star women with three nominations in their careers has declined. The highest paid screenwriter in Hollywood was a woman back in the 1930s. You sure don't see that anymore.

Or take a look at Nobel Prizes in the hard sciences -- the fraction going to women is in the low single digit percentages and has declined slightly since 1964.

The data are everywhere.

Posted by Steve Sailer | August 10, 2007 3:06 PM

I don't watch much TV, but the shows you discuss here seem overwhelmingly to be created by men: e.g., The Wire, The Sopranos, Deadwood, etc.

Posted by Steve Sailer | August 10, 2007 3:09 PM

It sure must be hard living in Ellens' world.It just never crossed my mind to check the sex of every blog I read. Much easier just to read the ones I find intersting.

Posted by mymy | August 10, 2007 3:36 PM

Angry white males or not, bloggers are privileged to have 'net access
http://blogs.dmregister.com/?p=7462

Posted by David Goodner | August 10, 2007 3:58 PM

Here's some more data, along with an explanation of anti-female bias:

"Human Accomplishment" sheds fascinating light on identity-politics issues. Women, for instance, account for merely 2 percent of the 4,002 significant creators in arts and sciences from 800 BC to 1950 AD. They are strongest in Japanese literature, with 8 percent of the significant names, including the third-ranked Japanese writer, Lady Murasaki Shikibu, author of the thousand-year-old proto-novel The "Tale of Genji." Women are particularly insignificant in composing classical music (0.2 percent) and inventing technology (0.0 percent).

Is this changing much? Murray unofficially glanced at who “flourished” after 1950 (depressingly to me, he assumes careers peak at age 40) and found female accomplishment to be up sharply only in literature. In fact, the percentage of Nobel Prizes won by women fell from 4 percent in the first half of the 20th century to 3 percent in the second.

Still, Murray’s rankings may be slightly unfair to female artists because they are less likely to have brilliant followers. My wife, for example, was incensed that Jane Austen finished behind the lumbering Theodore Dreiser and the flashy Ezra Pound. Yet, these men probably did have more influence on other major writers. That’s because subsequent famous authors were mostly male and thus less interested than the female half of the human race in Austen’s topics, such as finding a husband.

http://www.amconmag.com/11_17_03/review.html

Posted by Steve Sailer | August 10, 2007 4:13 PM

Oh God.
Isn't ONE Michelle Malkin ENOUGH??

Posted by Don Williams | August 10, 2007 5:05 PM

Women, for instance, account for merely 2 percent of the 4,002 significant creators in arts and sciences from 800 BC to 1950 AD.

Steve, women were treated badly betwen 800 BC and 1950 AD. It's a good explanation, even though it's politically correct.

Is this changing much? Murray unofficially glanced at who “flourished” after 1950

This is very very weak.

jenny

Posted by jenny | August 10, 2007 5:48 PM

Actually, I don't have directly comparable data since blogs and magazines are structured rather differently, but I will say that I think D Beth is on to something above when she suggests that there is a difference between the pure-play, outside-the-Beltway blogs and the insider ones attached to traditional Washington institutions. Digby, Jane Hamsher, and Arianna are all (or were, at one point) based out of California, and my own research, also for the Shorenstein Center, suggested that California-based Mother Jones was also better than other opinion magazines at launching the careers of young women journalists and pundits. Meanwhile, The Prospect, which helped launch Matt's career, has hired more than a third of its male writing fellows for staff jobs since the writing program was launched more than eight years ago, but not one of the female fellows. So to the extent that the blogosphere today is similar to liberal magazines, it's partly a reflection of broader phenomena, and partly a direct result of the fact that a rather substantial subset of prominent bloggers have been aided along the way by institutions that have historically done more to encourage and promote male than female writers.

Also, to the commeter who cited Wonkette, that blog is written by a group of men and has been for more than a year, so it ought not be included on the list of female-led blogs.

Posted by Garance Franke-Ruta | August 10, 2007 6:08 PM

Digby, Jane Hamsher, and Arianna are all (or were, at one point) based out of California,

None of the three place a particular focus on women's issues, do they?

Posted by SomeCallMeTim | August 10, 2007 6:49 PM

Arianna Huffington is an outsider who has succeeded on pure merit?

Posted by Steve Sailer | August 10, 2007 6:58 PM

Back in 1990, when I started writing op-eds for fun and sending them to newspapers, I quickly noticed that most of the op-ed editors who accepted my essays were women, while most of the successful freelance op-ed contributors who received $150 checks from these female editors were men.

Garance Franke-Ruta could no doubt come up with some sort of convoluted explanation for why this is all part of the male plot to hold women back, but Occam's Razor would suggest that women in the opinion business are more motivated to get a regular salary working in an editorial capacity, while men are more motivated to try to grab the world by the lapels and let everybody know what's on their minds.

One obvious source of data on sex difference is the sex of people who contribute comments to blogs. There's no money, no power, no nothing for doing it, just the satisfaction of sounding off and out-thinking your rival. On this blog, for instance, the only question about the sex of contributors of comments is whether they are more than 90% or more than 95% male.

Posted by Steve Sailer | August 10, 2007 7:09 PM

Occam's Razor would suggest that women in the opinion business are more motivated to get a regular salary working in an editorial capacity, while men are more motivated to try to grab the world by the lapels and let everybody know what's on their minds.

Your blade is dull.

Posted by SomeCallMeTim | August 10, 2007 7:25 PM

I remain unconvinced that most arguments of the men are X, women are Y type can be substantiated, especially since these are always non-sequiturs. We can say Men like football, women like to shop, but we haven't learned anything, really, and even when we have something obvious like the above (the high falutin' speculation of the Sailers in the world is never so cut and dry), we still can't ken how it is that this came to be. It would be folly to suppose that the penchant of a significant percentage of the female demographic for buying shoes is a feature implicit in the design of their gender. When the question of why there are fewer women in politics/business/blogging comes up, some BS answer such as Sailer's ingenious: "Occam's Razor would suggest that women in the opinion business are more motivated to get a regular salary working in an editorial capacity," takes this proclivity to oversimplify to ridiculous extremes. If it really is the case that there are fewer women political bloggers than men, it's going to come down to a lot of variables, including the individual choices of millions of people, and pretending that we can discern within the maddening buzz of discourse some inescapable pattern of thought or habit that "explains" the emergence of gender asymmetries is arrogant beyond belief.

Posted by Gordon Lightfoot | August 10, 2007 7:59 PM

"...it does raise the obvious question -- not is the progressive political blogosphere male-dominated, but compared to what is it male-dominated?"

matt, progress simply a comparative of which we have not settled the superlative. you can't wriggle out of this.

Stop
Colonizing
Ms. Goodman's
Body
Now

you mysogynist hegemon.

Posted by jummy | August 10, 2007 8:14 PM

In reality, the blogosphere is biased in favor of women -- at least, in favor of extremely attractive young women with the same interests and opinions as men.

This was proved a few years ago by the hilarious "Libertarian Girl" hoax. A typical libertarian blogger (some guy living in his parent's basement) wasn't getting anywhere in the blogosphere, so he started a new blog called "Libertarian Girl" and posted a big picture of a cute blonde that he found on a Ukrainian mail order bride website. And then he posted the same kind of stuff as he used to post under his own identity on "Libertarian Girl." Soon, she (he) was the toast of the libertarian blogsophere, with tons of links from male bloggers who found her (his) opinions amazingly insightful and artfully articulated.

http://libertariangirl.typepad.com/my_weblog/2005/02/if_it_werent_fo.html

Posted by Steve Sailer | August 10, 2007 9:26 PM

Alright, the libertarian girl thing is pretty funny. If I ever kick start a blog, I might have to do it as an attractive woman. I'll just have to make sure my pictures aren't traceable.

Posted by Gordon Lightfoot | August 11, 2007 12:24 AM

You don't need Libertarian Girl for this. Michelle Malkin is a put-up job.

Posted by Bloix | August 11, 2007 12:00 PM

That there's sexism even in the leftist blogosphere is proven every damn time this subject comes up. There's always the typical male sexist responses of "why is this a problem?", "women aren't interested in politics", and "these crazy women are at it again with their tally of the sexes at blogging". Just the response to the question proves there's a problem, no more data gathering is necessary.

As to SomeCallMeTim's point, it, too, proves the sexism. Interest in professional sports is considered to be generally masculine, yet no one suggested that Matthew's blog tends to focus on male-centric issues. Part of the phenomenon of sexism is that whenever women begin to talk about anything that men consider to be "women's issues", men immediately tune out. They don't consider that these issues might be relevant to themselves, they don't consider that they might be important from a civics perspective even if they're not directly relevant to their lives, and they don't consider that, as a practical rule, everything that men decide are "serious" subjects worthy of debate are expected to be of interest to women, while the reverse is never true.

Tim's right about what he is pointing out, though it proves the opposite of what he thinks it does. Women who capitulate to a male-centric mode of politically commentary are tolerated or accepted by men while, in contrast, those that refuse to do so and obnoxiously insist on talking about anything, ever, in in small amounts, thought to be "women's concerns" are tuned-out. That's the biggest problem, much more so than institutionalized sexism. It's the informal agreement between the entire community of male bloggers and male readers to subtly exclude women bloggers who refuse to blog as if they were men who are the culprits here. And they are easily evident in the comments to any post at any blog that either raises this issue, or even discusses the topic of feminism.

Posted by Keith M Ellis | August 11, 2007 3:18 PM