Pacific Views

Why aren't there more women political bloggers?

If you look up at the top of TruthLaidBear's weblog traffic rankings, you won't see many blogs from women. In the top ten, for example, there's only one female blogger: Wonkette. Since we started reading blogs oh so many years ago — and especially since we started doing our own blog last March — we've noticed both the relatively small number of political blogs by women, and how those blogs frequently don't get the attention that their quality would merit.

CJR's Campaign Desk has noticed the same thing. One of their posts today makes some interesting observations about why there aren't more successful political blogs by women.

Blood, who has written a book about blogging, argues that for a weblog to attract a wide audience, it has to have a narrow focus, a formula that works against women bloggers.

"A lot of the women who have weblogs will post about a lot of different things," she says. "They generally won't focus only on politics. I think that writing style tends to strike people as more personal, even when it really isn't."

Calpundit's Kevin Drum, who until recently diverged once a week from his steady focus on politics to blog about his cats, has seen firsthand what happens when you stray too far from the formula.

"Sometimes I get these incredibly angry emails about the Friday cat blogging," he says. "It's a blog, you know? If you don't like something, you can scroll down to the next post. But some people get really upset about it. Blogs aren't like newspapers, where you'll see a lot of different content. People only want to read about what they're interested in, and that's it."

Ana Marie Cox, a.k.a. Wonkette, acknowledges that she would have had a hard time breaking into the upper echelons of the blogosphere without the backing of British publisher Nick Denton (Gawker, Gizmodo, Fleshbot), who Sreenivasan refers to as "the New York Times Company of the blogosphere." "I was running my own personal blog for a while, and I like to think it was pretty good, but it didn't get anywhere near the attention Wonkette! gets," says Cox. She argues that there would be more female political bloggers if more women were led to believe that their opinions matter. "Vestiges of hundreds of years of gender stereotypes are still with us," she says. "Women get a different message from men about how to express their opinions. Women are not as encouraged to shout out their opinion. At times they're actively discouraged."