Gender, Teens, and Blogging
The role of gender in any cultural movement always raises important issues regarding how we interpret and dissect information, power, and the connections between. Over the past few weeks I have been keeping track of a few different pointers that start to look at different angles of this subject.
Gender and the Blog Author
Blogging has been growing in leaps and bounds. Naturally, many have started to wonder exactly what attracts a blogger to the process and experience, and quite notably, what the role of gender is in this forum. The general expectation, as one might expect, is that there is some noticeable gender gap when looking at the "average" profile of a blogger.
A couple of weeks ago I commented on David Huffaker's thesis work that examined the gender in the teenage blogging community. Interestingly enough, David's work found that, indeed, there was minimal appreciable difference in the female versus male use of blogging as a whole. Some small things, naturally, do exist. The BBC, a little behind the times on this one, recently posted a piece on the same body of research.
Here are some of the tidbits they picked on:
He also found that not only did teenage bloggers write a lot more than would be expected, they were also using the blogs as a form of "self-therapy".
"Blogs are an area for self expression. It gives them a space to be candid or personal where they don't usually have.
"I thought at first it was about exhibitionism, but a less cynical view is that they are trying to meet a common human need of finding connection."
Most of the blog posts were about their everyday lives, and what was happening in their school. About 67% used the facility that allowed them to comment on blog entries.
Just yesterday, danah boyd made a great observation relating to some rumblings that "the gender thing has been done to death":
Marginalized populations have different issues at risk when they voice their opinion. And damn do you have to be strong when you have an audience who feels the need to berate you just because. That's hard for anyone, but imagine how it feels when you look around and feel like you're one of few, when you feel marginalized from the get-go.
Are women more protective of their stories than men? More protective of their voice? Do they have good reason to be? Cause damn it feels shitty to be told that your concerns are written to death.
Source: apophenia, "I will speak until the death of gender inequality"
I would have to agree completely with danah that it matters to look at this aspect, regardless of the senseless complaints that it's been examined to death. It's too early in the day to make that type of assertion. We're only scratching the surface of blogging and audience dynamics and the more approach vectors we use to understanding this behavior, the broader our understanding.
Gender and the Blog Creator
The technology industry is over-populated with male developers and engineers. Looking back on my college days, the proportion of female computer science majors to male was tremendously low. I've seen this greatly change in the past few years and, more importantly, I've met and worked with countless exceptional women in the internet/web/tech industry.
A few weeks ago, I happened upon Eris Free's blog, specifically to a post titled "Templates and Women". This was around the time of the release of the new Blogger site and service. As she notes:
Blogger’s redesign also came with some truly well-designed and great Standards-Compliant templates. All from guys. I am glad that the templates are coded to standards, having myself been one of the first people on the internet who could boast about offering free Standards-Complaint templates. I’ve been making nice Standards-Complaint templates for Blogger (and other cms’) since August 03. C’mon guys, you couldn’t have invited a few girls to join the template-making party? I know what I’m doing, as do a few other girls.
[...]
Interesting sidenote: Unless I make my website’s design obviously feminine, I would be mistaken for a male designer at least once a week. Sadly, I was also taken more seriously by those same people.
This raises an important issue in terms of the development of technology as a whole. It would be interesting to know what proportion of developers currently building the software and services behind the blogging movement are women and what their experiences have been working in this space.
In fact, there are many segments that I can think about that it would be interesting to see more information on, specifically to understand how the incorporation of additional perspectives are evaluated and weighted.
If anyone knows of any research that has been done in the particular arena, please post some pointers for us all.