A Blog of Her Own
The rise of blogs authored by women, covering women’s issues and presenting a female perspective on events confirms that the Internet gives women a voice. We are beyond the era when email was the killer application and women praised the Internet for helping them save time and stay in touch with family. The blogosphere equips women with the tools to generate intense debate and increase awareness—among both male and female readers/writers—about unresolved issues women face daily (e.g., inequality, work-life balance, parenthood, etc.).
According to the blogosphere statistics from comScore, women blogs garner 8 percent of the standalone blogs' traffic. While this may sound like a small sliver of the pie, it is worth noticing that women’s issues emerge as their own category in a highly fragmented public space next to:
politics/news (43 percent)
technology (15 percent)
media (8 percent)
personal (6 percent)
business (3 percent)
In fact, the actual percentage of blogs written by women is even higher as there are many women writers and commentators in gender-neutral categories such as politics and healthcare.
Is the number of women publishing blogs enough to push for change at a large scale? Unfortunately, not yet. Although blogging gives women the opportunity to amplify their voice, top blogs authored by men still surpass those authored by women. A quick glance at Technorati’s top 100 blogs shows that only 18 percent have women writers--nine percent are written by women and another nine percent are written by a group of authors including women. The top women bloggers discuss a variety of topics besides women’s issues; such as technology, politics, design and personal stories.
The absence of women authorship in the blogosphere is similar to trends we see in the traditional news media:
• Although women have been the majority of college journalism majors since 1977 (Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication), they only account for one-third of journalists in the U.S. (Poynter Institute’s American Journalists Survey, 2003).
• Similarly, 38 percent of newsroom supervisors at U.S. newspapers are women (American Society of Newspaper Editors, 2005). The incidence is even lower in U.S. TV stations, where 21% of news directors are women (Radio-Television News Directors Association, 2005).
• Women correspondents reported only one-quarter of network TV news stories for the past four years (Center for Media and Public Affairs, 2005).
• Byline authorship is also heavily skewed towards men. Columbia Journalism Review (July-August 2005) reports that in an analysis of 11 of the nation’s top intellectual and political magazines published between October 2003 and May 2005, male-to-female byline ratios ranged from 13-1 at the National Review to 7-1 at Harper’s and The Weekly Standard to 2-1 at the Columbia Journalism Review.
While there seems to be a gender imbalance in (US) news rooms, women have a relatively stronger presence in lines of work that shape public policies. Indeed, women make up seven in 10 paid employees in non-profits (Hodgkinson & Weitzman, 2000) and they hold about one-third of policy making staff positions (Saidel, 2004)--according to a study of top-ranking gubernatorial appointees and staff advisors with policy-influencing responsibility in governors' offices.
Why not expand the reach of this intellectual power to wider audiences who may be tapping at their keyboards to connect with like-minded people and to gather information on issues of interest? Citizen journalism has the potential to significantly increase women’s presence in the public eye. While striving to get on the traditional media’s agenda and gain increasing editorial power over news content, women can sidestep biased institutions, set their own agenda in the blogosphere and reach thousands of people through their own writing. The emergence of women’s blogs as a category indicates that social change can brew in the blogosphere.
Posted by Idil Cakim at January 9, 2006 12:51 PM
Trackback Pings
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.guidewiregroup.com/mt/mt-tb.cgi/83
Listed below are links to weblogs that reference A Blog of Her Own:
» heidi klum uncensored nude from heidi klum uncensored nude
heidi klum uncensored nude [Read More]
Tracked on May 11, 2007 05:01 PM