On my way to Blog.ac.uk at the start of the month, I was reading the Guardian & came across Men used to go fishing when they wanted to get away from ‘the wife’ and swap smutty jokes. Now they take up blogging. Talking to some of the other delegates, they expressed surprise, one commenting that the first he’d heard of blogs was MySpaces from his girlfriend & her (female) friends.
Yesterday, I saw an article in the Independent “There’s a good reason why women don’t write blogs“. A few pertinent points for those who’ve not got access to the archived version. (Unlike the Guardian, most Independent articles aren’t available for long online) Mary Dejevsky starts by quoting Iain Dale, a Conservative MP, saying
It doesn’t matter whether you’re talking about Conservatives, Labour or Lib DEm bloggers … you won’t find many written by women”.
He added:
“being much better gossips than men [women] ought to be ideally suited to the world of blogging”
Mary suggested that she felt it wasn’t just political blogging that men were more prominent in, but most fields, other than childcare etc. She suggests that it’s primarily because women are less confident than men that the rest of the world wants the benefit of our opinion.
Josie and Anne Davis both produced lists of women bloggers on International Women’s day – I suggest we should forward them to Mary – who knows, she may want to take up blogging at some point.