Having recently read this entry by David, this entry by Geoffrey, this one by Chuck, and this by Jason, I was surprised to read this:
Does anybody else find it sort of odd that academic blogs (or at least the ones I am most interested in…. the pseudonymous variety) seem to be heavily dominated by female voices whereas more “serious” blogs that don’t really address personal stuff (political, or the academic blogs like Crooked Timber or non-pseudonymous ones) seem to be more male dominated?
Why do pseudonymous academic blogs seem to be mostly by women? The way to get at the answer is to ask academic bloggers why they blog pseudonymously or under their real name. I’ve addressed this question a little in the past.
Why do women tend to write about more personal stuff than men do? The evidence doesn’t bear out the premise of the question. Do I not write about personal stuff here? (Hint: what do you think you’ll get if you follow the link to the category of posts labelled “Story of My Life”?) Do the male writers I link to above (among others) not write about personal stuff, too? Wtf?
Forgot to comment on this one before, so a belated point. The blogger did *not* say that men don’t blog personal stuff (or pseudonymously) or that women don’t blog professionally and under their own names, but that there’s a tendency for female and male academics to blog in these different ways. That’d be my general impression too – even though I don’t fit those tendencies either. But I agree that we need more evidence, and we need to ask why it happens, if it does.
No doubt, there will before long be whole sociological departments devoted to the whys and hows of blogging, and then we’ll know that blogging is ‘in’ and we’re no longer the evangelical vanguard, and we can start harking back to the ‘golden age’ of blogging before everyone else came and ruined it for us…
Blogging and Privacy in the Times
George Washington University law professor Jeffrey Rosen has an article in the Sunday New York Times Magazine that explores the ways in which blogs are redefining the boundaries between public and private. For most bloggers, this type of story is…
Earlier comment posted on the temporary location for this site:
Here are a bunch of comments that were posted at this blog’s temporary relocation:
He Blog, she Blog?
I don’t really have the energy to link and trackback this discussion to the degree it deserves, but there’s been a discussion lately about whether or to what degree we might speak of gender differences in blogging.