Wednesday, September 2, 2009

What are we going to do about the blogger gender gap?

April DeConick says, "Alright, the gender gap among bibliobloggers is appalling. The gender gap has nothing to do with the internet or women being afraid to blog or publicly speak our minds since women do this in many other internet forums."

At her blog, The Forbidden Gospels, she goes on to make a proposal for what we are going to do about the blogger gender gap! Her hypothesis and proposal:
So this is my hypothesis. I think there are as many women bibliobloggers out there as men, but they are not visible. Why? Because many of us women post on subjects that are considered marginal (even heretical, especially if there is any feminist bent) to bible studies by the men who are blogging about the bible. Our blogs are easily justified as unimportant. They remain unknown or unread because they haven't been linked to by the male bibliobloggers who dominate this blog niche and the field in general, a point that Julia wisely raised in the comments to my last post on this subject. Julia wrote: "But I also wonder about the role of networking and way that many of the blogs in the top tier regularly reference one another. How do we encourage each other's success, make sure that others find the good work that's out there?"

So I say, enough of this nonsense and rationalizations. This is what I'm going to do. This weekend when I have more time, I am going to get the women bibliobloggers (all of them) into my sidebar blog roll. I am going to start with this list that Biblioblog Top 50 has so kindly put together on women's blogs (their so-called marginal blogs). And if any of my women readers have biblioblogs not in that list, or if any of my readers know of other women bibliobloggers not in that list, send that information to me and I will add it to the blog roll. Those links will be there for anyone who wishes to copy them and get them into their own blog rolls.
So feel free to join in! April links to her email address at her own blog. Read that full post, and feel free to do something about the blogger gender gap.

(To be clear, I myself am not blogging. Just relisting my old blogroll of the blogs of many of you whose blogs many men in the biblioblogosphere may have considered "marginal." It's here now both in an RSS feed form and in the sidebar (individual links) format. For those of you sifting thru, you'll find blogs by some who've stopped blogging, many who are feminists, many who are bibliobloggers, and some who are feministbibliobloggers. The point is there are many who "post on subjects that are considered marginal (even heretical, especially if there is any feminist bent) to bible studies by the men who are blogging about the bible" and there are many more to recognize.)

2 comments:

udernation said...

Clicking through many of the blogs on your old blogroll authored by women, I've found that most of them have stopped blogging. I don't know why that is, but if there's been some kind mass exodus of women from the blogosphere of late, it might explain April's observation - although it would raise the question why?

J. K. Gayle said...

Thanks for clicking through, "sifting" I believe. It's a very old list and outdated. Yes, many have gone on, as I have. But notice how many of these abandoned blogs are by men.

(I've only offered the roll lest it help with the cataloging of biblio bloggers undetected by the Top 50.

I'm not here getting into the whys of the problem,

just wanting to give some towards a solution.)