I’m grooving on these frequent, article-length, well-reported Campaign Desk articles. This one’s particularly interesting.
Political blogs are mostly written by men, it turns out. While this is hardly news to me, it’s odd how rarely I’ve stopped to think about it. Tara McKelvey and Garance Frank-Ruta represent over at TAPPED, but otherwise, I don’t read any female political bloggers on a regular basis. So now I just feel vaguely unsettled. Besides Wonkette!, where are the female-written political blogs?
Note that despite women’s absence from the political blogosphere, even in the Campaign Desk article Kathleen Hall Jamieson continues her unchallenged hegemony over the realm of Random Sources, commenting on everything from women’s thoughts on the rodeo to the impact of talk radio.
2 comments
Bloggers write about what they’re interested in. I agree with the Campaign Desk author’s Darwinian assessment that “The blogosphere . . . shows us that while women are just as interested as men in spouting off, they’re fundamentally less interested than men in spouting off about politics.” There are exceptions, of course. If you’re looking for a female political blogger who isn’t afraid to cat blog when the spirit moves her, take me, for example.
The catblog is out of the bag
Ooh, I like that study. They’re very up-front with the limitations of their sample size, but even with a very high (+/- 14.5%) margin of error, the differences between male and female bloggers are striking.
Important question: Are women less politically engaged in general?
Easy answer: No.
In 2000, 58% of men voted; 61% of women did. (Source: Census report, PDF.)
Verrry interesting.