what did they expect?

Newsweek has an article about how the recent blogger attendees to the Harvard blog conference were mostly male. To that I say DOH! The Harvard conference was invite-only and of course the largest boys club would invite mostly males to their conference. Where and how did they do their research?

Newsweek is completely off, as well as Harvard in their conference. I don't think any of the bloggers I frequent were included in the invite. My blogroll and the blogs I read are more than 50% women. I would suggest a poll be done at some of the open blogger conferences and communities and see how that compares with the Harvard sample.

Grrr... the more you perpetuate the male boys club worldview, the longer it will persist.

Comments

[gloria]

Send this post to Newsweek as a wake-up call. That's the problem with polls and articles, most just quote the data but they don't say from what kind of research they come from.

[heathervescent]

Hi Steven,

Caught your article on Newsweek.com. I'm not really surprised that your recent attendance to the Harvard Blogging Conference did not meet with many female bloggers. The Harvard conference was, I believe, by invite-only. With the Harvard community holding the invite list it is no surprise that it was male focused. In the attendee list
(http://cyber.law.harvard.edu:8080/webcred/index.php?p=4) I saw none of the familiar faces in my own blog community (Los Angeles) or the larger blog community. (Compare with the registration list at Bloggercon:
http://www.bloggercon.org/III/registrants)

If you're holding the invite list, it's no surprise that there isn't much diversity (unless that was the focus of the conference, which it wasn't).

For women bloggers check out Sylvia Paull of Gracenet (http://whoisylvia.typepad.com/my_weblog/), Susan Mernit
(http://susanmernit.blogspot.com/) and Amy Gahran (http://blog.contentious.com/).

Also check out Sean Bonner's recent post on women blogging:
http://www.seanbonner.com/blog/archives/001558.php

As far as the top 100 blogs are concerned, we must be aware of the popularity cycle. Once something is identified as a top (10, 100, etc) list, publicizing it's popularity continues to somewhat maintain it's list position regardless of it's actual worth or value or original popularity. This is why you're not necessarily going to get a good sample by taking a top 100 list (The problem with Harvard going with Technorati top 100 blogs).

The value of blogs (and the internet) is to be able to connect and find content and people that matter on the micro-level. If you think about the diversity of home pages on the web, when the Internet was new, compared to the diversity in blogs, blogs are very diverse.

The concern for women and minorities should not be limited to their representation in the blogosphere, but further reflected by their positions in the business world. We continue to have a long way to go before we see a significant number of women and minority C-level executives. It is an issue of representation on this level that is of more interesting and culturally changing than whether women blog as much as men.

Cheers,

-Heather Schlegel
heather@heathervescent.com
www.heathervescent.com
http://heathervescent.blogs.com/heathervescent/2005/03/what_did_they_e.html