One of the curious of political blogging in the UK is how male dominated it is. Although the Office of National Statistics’s figures show that the majority of bloggers in the UK are female and the majority of voters are female too, take a look through lists of Conservative, Labour or Lib Dem bloggers and you see lists that are dominated by men. The same applies with other parties and independent blogs. Political blogging in the UK is male dominated. But why?
One explanation is that UK politics overall is male dominated. Just look at the number of MPs or Cabinet members of each gender. Yet women and men turn out to vote in roughly equal proportions and, because there are more women than men on the electoral register, the majority of voters are usually female. Given that anyone can create a blog, why would the male domination kick in at the level of blogging?
A similar phenomenon is seen with commenting on political blogs, where the comments threads are more usually dominated by men. In this case questions of moderating rules and the culture that builds up around the comment threads on a site go some way to providing explanations. However, the similarity in the blogging and commenting patterns also suggests common factors are at work explaining both.
A clue as to how to answer all this is in the polling done for the recent Hansard Society publication The internet and the 2010 election. Overall it found that 51% of adult male UK internet users engaged with the general election online, either via official routes (such as visiting a party website) or unofficial ones (such as forwarding a link to a satirical online video). Amongst adult female internet users it was just 38%, 13 percentage points lower.
Looking specifically at posting political comments on blogs or social networks, 8% of male adult internet users did this and 4% of women did (though some caution should be applied about margins of error on these smaller numbers). The Hansard Society report concludes that “in general men were considerably more likely to engage in the online campaign compared with women”.
That finding is comparable to other evidence, such as the balance of male and female fans of the Lib Dem Voice page on Facebook and (in 2009, the most recent data I have seen) for the official Liberal Democrat page. Both are heavily male.
In other words, the male dominance of blogging and commenting seems to reflect a wider question of engagement with politics in the UK rather than specific features of either of those two practices. That may not answer my original questions, but it makes it clearer where the answers are to be found and, as evidence from newspaper letters pages suggest, the answer may not lie online at all.
Perhaps partly too it is a question of gender differences when it comes to self-promotion. There are plenty of individuals who defy the clichés about men being more willing to say “look at wonderful me” than women. But there is also evidence suggesting that there is overall a difference here, as reflected in the male dominance of Digg and Reddit but which drops away as you move to social networks that are less about “hey, *I* think this story is important”.
Both those statistics and the ONS figures were pointed out to me by Jennie Rigg, who in her own thought-provoking post on this topic said,
Yet another part of the problem is that although what might be termed initial content (blogs, tweets, etc.) is majority-female, promotion tools, such as Digg, Technorati, blog aggregators like Lib Dem Blogs, etc. are majority-male. So men recommend posts by men to other men.
It’s a problem I found when selecting two posts each Saturday evening for inclusion in our former Sunday View feature. Despite deliberately wanting to have a range of bloggers featured over time that was a diverse set of people, with good geographic spread and a fair sprinkling of new names in amongst the regulars I know from the tallies that I sometimes made that it often ended up far short of that.
An important caveat to this – and one Jennie also points out – is that I have used “politics” as a shorthand for politics in the sense of elected public office and the elections, campaigns, debates, candidates and parties that go with that. Politics has other meanings too, and in particular my definition excludes much of the online commentary about feminism which other definitions would count as politics. Even so, there are other issues here than solely the question of how “politics” is defined.
In particular, a worry is that as the number of people online and the number of hours spent online both continue to grow in the UK, that may reinforce rather than undermine the historic male-dominance of British electoral politics. Such broad issues very rarely have a quick or simple solution, but here’s one suggestion. Local parties are used to making efforts, often very successful, to attempt to get a broad and diverse range of people standing in their patch for local elections. Why not apply some of that to trying to ensure that the team of people who is involved in running the local party website, Facebook group or other online presences is similarly diverse?
And if you have other suggestions, why not share them in the comments?
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23 Comments
Just a suggestion, Mark, but given how much of this is based on Jennie’s work, would it not have been a bit more in keeping with your stated aim of gender balance to just commission Jennie to work up the article for you rather than having a man, however well intentioned, end up with the credit?
Richard: the trigger for this post was the new Hansard research (which I came across as it appears in a publication I’ve also contributed to – one of the serendipitous benefits of writing!) and I think adds some very useful evidence to previous discussions, including the several blog posts I’ve written on the subject before.
Jennie’s certainly also covered the subject well – and put me right on a time or two 🙂 – and your idea of asking Jennie is she’d like to do a post also is an excellent one which I’ll take up. I don’t quite though agree that it’s an issue only one person can write about; indeed, I think there are some advantages in both men and women writing about?
Purely an observation from my own experience – but men seem more interested in displaying their intellectual worth than women which I think could be a contributing factor
This is a very thought-provoking post. Jennie herself has some excellent suggestions for evening out the imbalance in her post that Mark links to – everyone who has read this post should read Jennie’s too.
And I think Richard F may have a point…
Richard, Jennie stated just over a month ago that “. I am therefore, as of today, no longer linking to or contributing to any sites which carry messagespace advertising” with specific reference to LDV…
Another related gender imbalance is one I discovered when I first went to a Liberal Youth conference (Swedish Liberal Youth, I should add!). There was an introduction day for new delegates where they had separate male and female classes on speaking. In the male class we were told that most speakers in debates tend to be men (as indeed they did in the conference most of the time). One reason for this is that men are more likely to make their speech even if someone else has already made the same point as they were going to make compared with women. Maybe this is part of the explanation for male-dominated comment threads (on those blogs where invective doesn’t scare sensible people away. Yes Guido, I’m talking about you…).
That said, as an occasional blog author I do like having comments that agree with me as well as disagreeing!
Re Messagespace adverts, the best way to get rid of them is to donate to LDV so that they don’t need them to cover running costs. I don’t like some of the ads either, but I suspect they pay better than other advertisers precisely because they focus on political audiences.
We all use LDV so much that a few pounds a year each is a price worth paying in my opinion, which is why I make a small regular donation. After all, Lib Dem Blogs is run off donations. Perhaps LDV should start using a thermometer thingy like Ryan’s on Lib Dem Blogs to get people to donate…
Not to derail the discussion, but…
Niklas – Jennie and I, and a few other bloggers, were involved in some discussions with the people running LDV, about the time she posted that. I won’t go into details about private discussions, but suffice to say that donations will not be replacing MessageSpace any time soon for funding this site…
But wasn’t really trying to get into that discussion, just pointing out that Jennie has stated publicly, fairly recently, that she’s not going to contribute to the site.
Is that as a matter of principle or simply because they don’t expect very much money to come in from donations? (I know how much Messagespace brings in to LDV: you’d need a fair amount in donations to equal it.) My opinion on donations is if you don’t ask, you don’t get.
the main is of men online is due to the fact that women are the hardest hit by the cuts and therefore have no time to blog as they are trying to protect the vulnerable.
When you note that blogs about child raising, cooking and knitting are overwhelmingly written by females, what conclusion do you draw?
Personally, I don’t have much time for this sort of stuff. I don’t care what a blogger has between their legs. I base them on merit alone. Mainly, are they writing something that’s different, thought-provoking, challenging my views on the world? If they are, I’ll read their stuff to it and link to it where possible. That’s all that interests me.
Besides, how do you know that just about all the political bloggers around are male? Many people blog under a pseudonym. For example, Kerry McCarthy once published a post on her blog asking if Old Holborn is actually a woman. As it happens, he definitely isn’t.
Finally, why does The Office of National Statistics feel it needs to know what sex the majority of bloggers are in the first place?
Good and timely article Mark – but I wonder if the real problem is more prosaic: that men are simply more opinionated than women?
Well obviously it’s all down to discrimination isn’t it, so we must tack;e that by all-female bloglists etc. Maybe every so often, LibDemVoice should be turned “all female” i.e. any postings to it made by non-females should be rendered inaccessible.
Or maybe not, and maybe from this some might see why all-female shortlists and the like are not really tackling the deeper problem of which what is observed is just a symptom.
The better half simply has no interest in a dislocated and indirect conversation with a crowd, and I suspect it is because she prefers the emotional connection of direct conversation with an individual.
This example might be indicative of a broader male/female trend…………
It’s a bit disingenuous to automatically call this a “problem”.
In an environment of limited size – the House of Commons, say – then relative numbers of men and women are important. The success of men in getting elected prevents women from achieving seats and influence.
On blogs, though, it’s not a zero sum game. There are lots of female bloggers, but there are even more male bloggers. Readers can choose to follow who they want and the higher output of male writers doesn’t prevent people from finding posts by female writers.
And, of course, just “being a blogger” is no badge of success. There’s reams and reams of brainspew all over the internet. Just because the raw number of men bloggers is higher than that of women doesn’t imply that increasing the number of female bloggers is a desirable thing. The majority of what is written is ignored by internet users. Probably more important to concentrate on getting women (and other minorities) involved in local activism and running as candidates for election and, if they are successful there, *then* to consider writing about it.
“The better half simply has no interest in a dislocated and indirect conversation with a crowd, and I suspect it is because she prefers the emotional connection of direct conversation with an individual.”
Jedibeeftrix has hit the nail on the head there.
You could say that males are more likely to be stupid enough and self-deluded enough to waste their time chucking their thoughts into a relative abyss!
“You could say that males are more likely to be stupid enough and self-deluded enough to waste their time chucking their thoughts into a relative abyss!”
I am certainly over-fond of throwing my batty ideas into the interpots.
Um, Paul?
How does that explain the point that the majority of bloggers are actually female?
Did you, y’know, actually read the post, or the highly recommended links?
“Grim Reaper”. You say you “don’t care”. That effectively means you’re not paying attention. If the overwhelming majority of the sites that you read are those that write the stuff you think is interesting are written by men, and appeal to your interests as a man, you don’t learn other perspecties. Same is true if they’re all straight, or all white, or all educated middle class, etc.
Essentially, your privilege is showing. You don’t notice, and it may be you genuinely don’t. But normally,t he exact words you’ve used are a paraphrase of “I don’t care if there’s a problem, if there is, it’s to my benefit”.
There may, or may not, be a problem. Pretending it’s not worth looking at makes it worse.
19 comments, and 17 for of them sure by men 😉
I’m put off debate elsewhere because it rarely seems to rise beyond name-calling and a total unwillingness to consider anyone else’s point of view.
Certainly some political blogs seem to attract incredibly intolerant and often vile commenters it would be pointless to try to engage with.
Take a quick glance at the comments on ‘David Cameron’s father has died’ on Guido’s blog… nice people out there.
@Cassie: Good heavens. I need to wash my brain now.
Sorry, Thomas: I should’ve put a health warning on the suggestion!
Gotta love ‘ads by Google.’
Thread on male dominance online and it produces a link to “100s Genuine Moldovan Women Wonderful Wives”.
Cassie: “I’m put off debate elsewhere because it rarely seems to rise beyond name-calling and a total unwillingness to consider anyone else’s point of view.”
Agreed. While everything I say here is only based on my own experience etc., the debate I’ve seen of this kind is dominated by men, and I certainly also know many women who don’t think it’s worth bothering with. Personally I don’t know why anyone regardless of gender is interested in that kind of conversation, but I’ve had male friends tell me it is a male thing, so.
I also think Niklas Smith’s point about men being more likely to stand up and repeat points made by others even if it adds absolutely nothing to the discussion is a contributing factor; I’ve seen this in many debates, some of them ironically about feminism and women’s inclusion.
One further contributing factor is in a lot of the discussions I’ve had with men about feminism, my experience of being a woman doesn’t seem to count for anything unless I can ‘prove’ it, presumably with statistics (see above on unwillingness to listen to anyone else’s point of view).
I think the problem is often with the style of conversation being had (unproductive), and I’d be interested to know why those involved seem to be mostly male.