It’s nice to have discussions and build friendship when being a stay-at-home mum is quite lonely. (Female respondent, 2007)

Male dominance

The substantial number of women bloggers and the success of the mommy bloggers have not, however, led to female dominance in the blogosphere – rather the opposite in fact. Research into the North American blogosphere has suggested that male bloggers tend to receive more links to their blogs from other bloggers (for references to the extensive online debate, see Pollard, 2003; 2004a, 2004b; Garfunkel, 2005). Having more links places a blog higher in the popularity ranks, and the effect is amplified by the use, by blog-monitoring sites such as Technorati, of page-ranking algorithms that give greater weight to links from blogs that are themselves highly ranked. Ratliff (2006) has also produced evidence that men’s postings receive more comments than women’s. It has also been claimed that a greater amount of attention is given in the media to male bloggers (Herring et al., 2004a; Pedersen and Macafee, 2006). For example, in the UK the apparent lack of women bloggers on political issues prompted Taylor (2004) to ask: ‘Is Blog a Masculine Noun?’ while Michael A Banks’ book Blogging Heroes: Interviews with 30 of the World’s Top Bloggers (John Wiley & Sons, 2007) includes interviews with 30 bloggers whom he considers to be influential, ground-breaking and successful, of whom 23 are male bloggers and only seven women.

There is, however, one area of media debate where female bloggers dominate: all discussion about sex blogging. Blogging about sex is dominated by women, possibly because the Internet offers a safe space within which women can express truths about their own sexuality (Attwood, 2009). However, sex blogging has low status in the blogosphere, viewed as a cheap trick with which to get more hits and links (Ray, 2007, quoted Attwood, 2009). In September 2006, the monthly issue of the UK Observer Woman magazine (a supplement to the Observer Sunday newspaper) ran an article on ‘Confessional bloggers – the women whose sexploits reached thousands of readers’ (Behr, 2006). This article identified five female bloggers, two of whom were British, including Belle de Jour. The article focused solely on sex-confessional blogging by women and made no mention of male bloggers at all. This prurient interest in women who blog about sex is, happily, not the only attention paid to women bloggers by the British media: the Guardian’s ‘Women’ page has run articles about feminist bloggers. Nevertheless, media coverage of blogging has focussed disproportionately on men, and female bloggers are usually presented as a minority, unless, of course, the subject under discussion is sexual confession, in which case 100 per cent of the bloggers discussed are women.

So on one hand we have evidence that at least half, if not more, of all bloggers – particularly journal bloggers – are women, but on the other hand researchers and the mainstream media are suggesting that the blogosphere is dominated by male bloggers. Why is this? One of the reasons suggested for such an imbalance is that blogs about technology and politics, which are popular subjects throughout the Internet, are more likely to be authored by men. It is also suggested that men are more likely to blog about external events, rather than personal ones, and are therefore more likely to be found by prospective readers when using a search engine. Such discussions have led to the establishment of the BlogHer movement in the United States with the mission to create opportunities for women bloggers to pursue exposure, education and community. However, it should be noted that Lopez suggests that it was at the inaugural BlogHer Conference in San Jose, California, in 2005 that mommy bloggers felt themselves to be particularly under attack for their style of blogging, leading one leading mommy blogger, Alice Bradley, who writes Finslippy, to declare: ‘Mommy blogging is a radical act’ (Lopez, 2009: 730).

What does seem certain is that the majority of bloggers – male and female – do not take the opportunities offered by the anonymity of the Internet to blur or switch gender. While the online world does offer individuals the opportunity to pretend to be the other sex in order to learn about their real self (Turkle, 1995), there is little evidence that such deception occurs frequently in the blogosphere. For example, Huffaker and Calvert’s (2005) study of teenage bloggers found that they used their blogs as extensions of their real-life world rather than as places to pretend, although male teen bloggers might use their blog to safely discuss a homosexual identity. Similarly, van Doorn et al. (2007) found that their sample of Dutch and Flemish bloggers accurately presented their gender identity through narratives of their everyday lives. This lack of gender experimentation is presumably linked to the amount of personal information the average blogger offers on his or her blog and the key motivation of keeping in touch with offline family and friends. As described below, as part of my research project I investigated all links on each respondent’s blogroll and noted sex and geographical location of all linked bloggers. There were very few occasions on which I was not able to ascertain sex, either through the ‘About Me’ section of the blog or through information in the posts themselves. Thus, most women bloggers make themselves identifiable as women in the blogosphere and therefore any differences in popularity or impact that can be discerned between women and men bloggers must be linked to their sex, to the subjects they blog about or to some particularly gendered way in which they blog.

Women’s motivations for blogging

If female bloggers are different to male bloggers, at least with regard to their chances of popularity or success, are they also different in their motivations for blogging? Are there any specifically female motivations? Why are women attracted to blogging?

For the most part, there were no significant differences between the male and female respondents to the surveys. As described in previous chapters there was little difference between men and women in their choice of definitions of blogging: journalism, publishing, diary-keeping and creative writing. Men and women were also agreed that the role of blogging in their own lives was primarily as a leisure activity. For both sexes, things that they might be doing instead of blogging included looking for or doing paid work, watching TV, or reading, although women were marginally more likely to mention hobbies or creative writing as other activities. Men and women found the same range of satisfactions in blogging, particularly exercising their talents and clarifying their thinking, although men were more likely to see their blogging as participation in a democratic movement and we saw in Chapter 3 that men were slightly more likely to describe their blogging in terms of citizen journalism. The majority of both sexes also agreed that they used blogging to vent their emotions or frustrations.

It has been suggested that men are more avid consumers than women of online information, while women are more enthusiastic online communicators (Fallows, 2005). If we see women as the communication hubs in a household, then Web 2.0 offers them Internet-based tools, such as social networking sites, e-mail and blogs, that help to fulfil social and interpersonal goals (Stefanone and Jang, 2007). Many of the differences in findings between male and female bloggers did reflect the greater importance for women of the social aspects of blogging. As seen in Tables 4.1 and 4.2, women were slightly more likely than men to encourage real-life friends to blog and to look at the blogs of their real-life friends.

Women were also more likely to belong to a blog-ring (a combined total of 45 women admitted belonging to at least one blog-ring in comparison to 28 men). Blog-rings connect a circle of blogs with a common theme or purpose. A link to the blog-ring is displayed on a blog and clicking on that link takes the reader to the blog-ring’s page, where the other members of the blog-ring are listed. Alternatively, clicking on the link takes the reader directly to the next blog in the ring. For women, the most popular blog-rings were those that linked them to other bloggers of the same sex such as ‘Blogs by Women’ or ‘Crazy/Hip Blog Mamas’. As one female respondent commented about blog-rings:

Male bloggers were more likely to belong to a blog-ring that promoted an interest or hobby, such as blog-rings for birdwatchers, Methodists or transvestites, which reflects the male bloggers’ preference for issue-based blogging, while female bloggers were more likely to belong to blog-rings that celebrated their femininity, which again reflects the female proclivity for more journal blogging with a focus on themselves.

Given the fact that diary-writing has always been seen as a feminine genre, it is not surprising that women respondents were slightly more likely to state that their blog had replaced a paper diary (26 women and 14 men). However, as we have already discussed, the essential difference between the traditional diary and a blog is dialogue with one’s readers and I would suggest that it is the validation offered by such feedback that is one of the main motivators for women who write journal blogs. Readers’ comments on women’s journal blogs are almost always supportive: either contrasting the blogger’s experience to their own, offering advice or simply using the oft-repeated phrase ‘you go, girl!’ It is noticeable that commentators are usually similarly situated and therefore feel an instant connection to the blogger’s experience. Perhaps this is not an unexpected finding. Working mothers comment on the blogs of other working mothers, ditto stay-at-home moms or home educators. Supportive comments on sites dedicated to miscarriages or attempts to conceive come from other women in the same situation. On rare occasions, a negative comment might be made. The useful thing about a blog is that the blogger is the editor and can immediately remove such a comment – thus making the ‘public’ sphere more ‘private’ again. However, in the time that this comment existed, the blogger is usually inundated by many more supportive comments than usual.

Margaret Beetham (2006) has compared the blogging of modern-day women to the letters written to women’s magazines in the second half of the nineteenth century, such as Woman at Home and Englishwoman’s Review. While Beetham makes some excellent points about the similarities between the two media opening the possibility to women of making their opinions known to a wider audience, I would suggest that a better comparison is with women who were consciously stepping outside the woman’s domestic sphere to involve themselves in debate in the much more public sphere of daily newspapers. Both blogs and newspaper correspondence are ways in which a woman could or can make her opinions known to people (both men and women) outside her particular domestic circle. While women bloggers are predominantly ‘journal’ bloggers, writing about personal events rather than commenting on external ones, many female correspondents to the early twentieth century newspapers also chose to write about matters pertaining to their home, their families or the domestic economy, justifying their entrance into publication by reference to their role as mothers or wives. However, as we have seen in the above-mentioned quote, even the most domestic journal bloggers can sometimes choose to enter into debate about issues such as politics and religion using the safe space of their blog, just as early women political activists such as the suffragettes used letters to the newspapers as a way of making their voices heard and their arguments clear even in conservative publications.

As far as the usefulness of blogging was concerned, women were slightly more likely to emphasise creative work and men to focus on their intellectual work.

It is interesting to note that more women than men saw blogging as bringing custom for their business. This may be related to the fact that more women respondents worked part time and in the home. Giving combined totals for both years of the survey, 27 female respondents described themselves as working part-time in comparison to 10 male respondents while 30 female respondents described their home as their place of employment in comparison to 19 male respondents. It seems that women based in the home, perhaps because of caring or other responsibilities, might use their blogs to support the establishment of freelance or part-time work.

Blogroll differences

One part of the 2007 project investigated in greater detail the respondents’ blogrolls. This part of the project was based on a short analysis of blogrolls undertaken for the 2006 respondents, which had suggested that women bloggers were more likely to recommend other women’s blogs than male bloggers, which is presumably linked to the subject matter of male and female blogs (see Pedersen and Macafee, 2006). In 2007 I wished to examine this proposition in more detail. The blogroll is a collection or list of favourite links to other blogs and is a common feature on blogs. They are sometimes referred to as ‘link lists’ or bookmarks. All blogroll links were followed and analysed in terms of who was writing the linked blog (man, woman or a group of bloggers) and geographical location. As will be seen, the findings agreed with the original proposition that male bloggers are more likely to recommend only other male bloggers to their readers while female bloggers are more likely to link to both male and female bloggers.

The average blogroll is not a long list of links. Fifty-eight (71 per cent) of the blogrolls analysed had ten or fewer links. Interestingly, the US male respondents were more likely to have longer blogrolls, only ten (33 per cent) having ten or fewer links. American male bloggers were also responsible for the two longest blogrolls in the survey, with 206 and 425 links. However, at least a quarter of the longest blogroll was made up of links that did not work, suggesting that the blogger continued to add links to his blogroll without checking or pruning previous recommendations. Indeed, the whole idea that the blogroll represents the recommended reading or favourite reads of a blogger becomes a nonsense when a blogroll is this long. In addition, many of these excessively long blogrolls appear to have taken a large amount of their content from an extant list, for example the ‘Methodist blogroll’, which two respondents used, and therefore their blogrolls do not reflect personal selection but rather an interest in or commitment to a particular group of bloggers. The Methodist blogroll, for example, invites readers to add their own blog to the list, thus encouraging a lengthy blogroll. This problem was acknowledged by one US male blogger who is a minister. His blogroll was divided into two sections. The first, and shorter, section was called ‘Daily reads’ and seemed to be his personal recommendations, while the second was the ‘Blogroll of Reformed Bloggers’ and again was a self-nomination blogroll linked to his particular religious beliefs. There seemed to be a connection between long blogrolls and religious interests. A fourth blogger with a long blogroll was an evangelical Christian from the United States who worked as a member of an online evangelical ministry. Most of the blogs in his blogroll were religious in nature.

Several female respondents on both sides of the pond were members of another self-nomination blogroll, ‘Women who blog’, which was made up of 110 links, all of them to female blogs, but again with a high number of failed links or abandoned blogs – just under a third (30 failed links). Again, just as with the blog-rings, it was noticeable that women bloggers chose to emphasise their gender when joining self-nomination blogrolls while the male bloggers joined blogrolls related to their interests, whether that was religion or bird-watching. This again can be related to the journal/filter division, with many women choosing to write journal blogs with an internal focus on their own lives and families rather than externally focused filter blogs. The promotion of women’s blogging that we see in organisations such as BlogHer may also have played a part in ensuring that female bloggers are more conscious of their gender in the wider blogosphere.

Not all long blogrolls were the result of the use of self-nomination blogrolls, however. Other bloggers took a more personal approach to their blogroll. For example, a UK male respondent who discussed his mental health problems on his blog had a particularly long blogroll with many links relating to mental health. However, his blogroll was in no sense a one-issue set of links, and he also had many links relating to his other interests in politics and cultural issues. A US female blogger who wrote columns for local newspapers in her home state offered a long list of bloggers based in that state. One respondent who took a very active interest in tending his blogroll was a US male blogger with an interest in birdwatching. He aims to produce the definitive list of birding blogs and has made some thoughtful posts about birding blogs worldwide, including one state-by-state analysis of all the American birding blogs to which he links. However, even his blogroll of 206 links had a 15 per cent failure rate, demonstrating how difficult it is for a blogger to stay on top of all the links in a long blogroll. The blogs with longer blogrolls tended to be associated with a particular interest or hobby; in other words, were ‘filter’ blogs. Longer blogrolls were much less likely to appear on the more diary-like journal blogs.

All links on the blogroll were followed and the sex of the linked blogger ascertained. This was usually discovered by reading the blogger’s profile or reading through the blog for sex-specific information such as ‘my pregnancy’ or ‘night out with the lads’. It was usually easy to discover the sex of a blogger, but blogs were not counted in this analysis if it was not possible to accurately decide the sex of the writer or if the linked blog was a group blog written by more than one person. There is in fact a website which professes to be able to discern the sex of a blogger with 80 per cent accuracy called ‘Gender Genie’ (http://bookblog.net/gender/genie.php). Gender Genie uses a simplified version of an algorithm developed by Koppel and Argamon to predict the gender of an author. You put a piece of text in (they recommend that it is over 500 words for the most accurate results), choose whether it is fiction, non-fiction or a blog entry, and then ask the program to analyse the words and indicate the gender it thinks the writer is. Herring and Paolillo discuss the Gender Genie approach in an article on gender and genre variation in blogs (2006). Out of interest, I tried Gender Genie out on my UK respondents. For the male bloggers, it identified 70 per cent correctly, but for the female bloggers only 46 per cent. While Gender Genie does not analyse the subjects of posts, but rather the language, it was amusing to discover that it could decide that a woman blogging about going for her first pregnancy scan was male! (Columnist Alexander Chancellor of The Guardian newspaper utilised the Gender Genie to analyse samples of his colleagues’ work in 2003 and also found that it correctly identified all his male colleagues but could only correctly identify one of his female colleagues, which suggests that this may be an on-going issue for the developers (Chancellor, 2003).)

Figure 8.1 shows the percentage of bloggers’ blogrolls linked to women’s blogs, broken down by nationality and gender. Perhaps not surprisingly, women bloggers were more likely to link to other female bloggers. However, the extent to which male bloggers, plus some women, ignored female blogs was surprising.

Of the 46 male bloggers who had blogrolls, twelve had no links at all to blogs written by women, in other words their blogroll was 100 per cent male-authored blogs. In addition, of the 43 female bloggers who had blogrolls, eight had no links to female bloggers. Four of the female bloggers had 100 per cent of their links to women-authored blogs. In all, thirty male bloggers had less than 20 per cent of their links to female-authored bloggers while only five male bloggers and 22 female blogs had over 50 per cent of their links to female bloggers. This indicates that male bloggers are more likely to be linked to via the blogroll and confirms earlier research by myself and Macafee (2006) and Henning (2003), who stated that women’s blogs make up only 15 per cent of all blogrolls. While female bloggers tend to link to both male and female bloggers, male bloggers are more likely to link only to male bloggers.

Previous work focusing on the North American blogosphere has suggested that male bloggers dominate this part of the blogosphere for a number of reasons. These include the likelihood that they blog about external rather than personal events; their enthusiasm for promoting their blog; and the linkage between male blogs. The present study has confirmed that male bloggers are more likely to recommend other male bloggers to their readers and more likely to be writing about external rather than personal events: i.e. filter rather than journal bloggers. Female bloggers, who are more likely to write journal blogs, are less likely to be linked to by other blogs, and this puts them at a disadvantage in terms of popularity in the blogosphere. Does this matter? If the average woman blogger is motivated to blog for communication and support purposes rather than to impress her opinions or expertise in public affairs on others, then does it matter that she has only a limited readership and few links from other blogs? If she is blogging about family and friends and personal domestic issues then it is perhaps not surprising that her readership is smaller than that of another blogger who writes about more external, public affairs. There is one aspect of the matter that might concern this woman blogger and perhaps lead her to change her blogging style – the money motive. As we have seen, there is a growing financial motivation in the blogosphere and many of the female survey respondents admitted that they hoped to use their blogs to earn additional income for their household. They usually hoped to raise this money through hosting advertising on their blogs – and advertisers tend to be attracted to blogs with a proven readership.

It therefore seems that while female bloggers share a lot of the same motivations for blogging as male bloggers, there are certain motivations that may be particularly linked to women. Given that women are more likely to write journal blogs it is not surprising to find the diary motivation important for women bloggers. In the same way, women are using blogs to continue their role as the household communicator with family and friends. However, this motivation can sometimes be at odds with concerns about revealing too much online. As was discussed in the chapter on privacy, women are more likely than men to have concerns about privacy on the Internet as a whole and also within their blogs, and this leads to them being careful with the personal information they release in their posts. They are particularly concerned about being identified by strangers because of details on their blog.

Women are appreciative of the way in which blogging offers them a way to showcase their creativity online – especially when such showcasing can coincide with a way in which to make some extra income. Women who do not leave the home to work, perhaps because they are acting as carers for children or other family members, might also use their blog to market their freelance skills or in some other way raise additional income for the family.

Finally, women are appreciative of the support they gain from their online communication with others in the same type of situation as them. With the advent of Web 2.0 women are using online communication tools such as blogs, e-mail and social networking sites to communicate with other women in similar situations, to offer and accept support and advice and to gain validation of their own opinions from outside the domestic circle.