Telling All Online: It's a Man's World (Isn't It?)

While the websites that traditional journalists tend to read and cite are written mostly by men, most people who are even vaguely familiar with weblogs would have little trouble finding good ‘blogs written by women. “Was there really a gender gap in Blogville? The answer, I soon learned, was complicated. And it was wrapped up in knotty issues like the power of celebrity, the male tilt of the computer industry, the grip of sexual stereotypes (women keeping diaries, men droning on about politics) and the preciousness of time – specifically, the fact that women with children and jobs have almost none to spare.” Lisa Guernsey

—Telling All Online: It’s a Man’s World (Isn’t It?)NY Times [registration])

Guernsey praises weblogs for giving men a chance to talk about their families and women a space to discuss politics, but I find the whole premise of her article troubling and ill-informed. James Lileks often writes humorous and detailed rebuttals of elitist or anti-American editorials, but he also writes fondly about his baby girl “Gnat.” “I, Cringely” is a geeky technology column on PBS (not a ‘blog, but regularly cited by bloggers) wrote an essay on the death of his infant son Chase (in his arms, while his father was reading e-mail) that moved me to tears: “as a grieving nerd, I feel the need to do something.” Both sites are widely cited by the kind of political and/or geeky bloggers that Guernsey dismisses as not interested in such “feminine” topics as raising children.