academic women and the blogosphere

Torill Mortensen has a post today referencing the ongoing debate about gender balance in the blogosphere. Are there more men, or more women? Are the men or the women more visible?

We've taken on that argument here before...I posted about Halley's piece on the Politics of Male Blogging. And on my personal site, I wrote about a presentation at AoIR that included research on gender issues--they found that there was a disjoint between the actual characteristics of weblogs and weblog writers, and the representations of both in the media (with media representations focusing on well-educated white male bloggers).

But in her post, Torill doesn't refer to those discussions...instead, she singles out danah boyd, claiming that danah's perception is of "men dominating the blogosphere." While she provides no citations to support this characterization, sShe goes on to say :

To reach that far she needs to be socialised to have certain interests and disregard others - we all are by the time the educational system is done with us. Her perception of a male dominance of the blogosphere is in that case not a perception that holds true for the world of blogs, but for the world of accepted, academic writing and her own idea of what is interesting and important reading.

I'm pretty sure Torill's never met danah. But to paint her--and all academics--with this broad brush is pretty bold. And as someone who _has_ met danah (and read a good bit of her work), I can say with some certainty that these assumptions are pretty far off.

Does our educational system create blinders that keep us from seeing diverse viewpoints? Sure. But there are some among us--and I'd argue danah is one--who work to think outside of that often patriarchal box.

The best way to change the perceptions, as Shelley has said in the past, is for us to continue to keep women who blog visible through links and reinforcements.

The only way we will make a dent in this world is to talk and keep talking and keep pointing things out and keep breaking into conversations, and disrupting networks [...]. Good stuff, bad stuff, doesn't matter, as long as we keep talking.

So my New Year's resolution in this regard? To keep talking about women and technology. To work harder to make those conversations part of both informal and academic discourse. And, of course, to post more here.

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Update: Ah. I just realized that Torill's probably referring to danah's post "why are bloggers mostly straight white men. That makes the post make a little more sense to me. I do note that danah specifically excludes LiveJournalers and other "journalers" from this characterization--which the Perseus study that Torill cites does not. In re-reading the comments to that post, I think danah does a pretty good job of qualifying her perception in the specific context. I don't think it's socialization that causes the perception that the visible technical and academic bloggers are primarily men.