I don't think many women are interested in economics and bridge blogging. My wife is a somewhat regular reader but has never been inspired to post, yet she's got a strong following in other fora where she talks about knitting and quilting and breast cancer. And there they worry about the sex bias being too strongly female.
Simiarly, engineering and mathematical university courses are pleased when they get more than 1 woman a year enrolling :)
But I prefer your way of saying it. keep to the Fen Causeway
There's a danger, when this sort of question is raised, of devaluing the content we have. There are indeed, a lot of discussions on subjects that I don't know much about, often by people who do it as their day job. And often I don't comment on those threads, because I feel I have nothing to add.
But...so what? This is a group blog. It so happens that it tends towards disciplines that are still male-dominated, but this is an issue to do with wider society, not the fault of ET and definitely not the fault of men for posting here, or experts for posting at their level.
We're actually doing quite well for female diaries at the moment. Fran is using the time freed from the salon to huge advantage, and we've had great diaries from Izzy and Cat. If there's an imbalance in ET's content, then it's really up to those of us who don't post very often (I'm one of the worst offenders, I know).
The worst thing that could happen as a result of this sort of meta is that men feel their style and content is driving away some sort of mythical ideal demographic and self-censor or stop posting altogether. Women will come, or they won't. But if they come, they'll come for content that interests them, not a dumbed down version of content that doesn't. Or no content at all.
I think the issue is one of light and shade. This is a liberal leftish political blog with a concentration on trans-atlantic geo- politics, so there's a lot of serious discussion about such issues. As is right and proper.
But as a group of peope who know each other there is a temptation to open up and branch out into other, more personal, territories on occasion. Sometimes this works and broadens the scope of what can be beneficially written about. It is these more personal aspects that lighten the blog, yet they are also the most fraught when the alliances we have formed are shown to more fragile and less well founded than we thought.
After all, dKos has little light and shade, the small corners of personal stuff such as the pootie diaries are heavily contested and always re-negotiated. But their user base is larger than ours and only the thickest skinned need apply. Here we can't afford to piss regulars off on a regular basis so we hold back a bit. And that's why the OT is the most valuable resource we have, it's the only area where we socialise and chat rather than discuss and debate.
So if you don't visit the OT, but look for the personal diaries, then this appears to be an austere unwelcoming place. keep to the Fen Causeway
But I couldn't post it. Probably I couldn't have done anyway, but to a degree it felt like lobbing a grenade into a garden party. That probably says more about my own stereotypes and prejudices as anything, but it did feel like a subject to which men might find it difficult to respond, and it seemed almost cruel to post it in a mostly male online environment. So I kept it, and rewrote it, and restrained it. And a month after that my hair started to grow back, and it was over.
But then, as you say, there's light, shade, and many options in between.
I've done some personal stuff here and I look back and wonder how I did it. Then I think I trusted ET more than I do now, I think that's probably something we've all been through and i'm not sure we're better for it.
I have stories I need to tell about some of the stuff i'm going through, after all, as someone once asked, how do I know what to think until I find the words to say it ? I am wordless and carrying a sack of ashes till I can dump it down. But is this the time ? Is this the place ? keep to the Fen Causeway
What I will say, though, as much to me as to you: if not here, if not now, then where? When? x
I submit it is wise to remember that any blog is essentially a Public Space where conversation is easily "overheard" and not forgotten; thus available at any time to people one would not want to have knowing personal stuff.
Second, the medium is so prone to mis-communication of intent, content, and tone that I, for one, tend to shy away from commenting on 'personal' diaries & comments.
I can understand why you found it hard to post your diary, Sassafras, but it's a pity because (apart from its "cathartic" usefulness to you in getting you to put your situation and feelings into words) you would probably have found you had the warm support of this community, and that might conceivably have been of some small comfort to you. Just as, when your difficulties in real life take you away from us, you are missed and thought of -- including by men.
And...it was such a small thing, really. I reminded myself daily that on the day I had to sit and cry in the doctor's car park before driving home, thousands of other people had probably done the same. And that most of them would have swapped places with me in a heartbeat. It even had its upside; I've never been a confident dresser, but that was The Summer I Wore Hats :). All of this was in the diary, and maybe I should have posted it. But the time has passed.
It is possible that "nerdy and technocratic" means that our target audience has some biases (in, e.g., gender ratios) that are beyond our power to change. I can live with that too - we work with the internet we have, not the one we'd like.
I just prefer that this is a conclusion that we arrived at after considering the facts, rather than an excuse that we invoke because it's comfortable.
(Turns out I did have internet access after all, albeit intermittently.)
- Jake If you only spend 20 minutes of the rest of your life on economics, go spend them here.
isn't it strange how in the middle east the woman/man ratio in science/engineering is 70/30% in favour of women?
i find it fascinating. i think women bloggers are really active in iran, from what i pick up here and there, no citation, sorry. ~"When an inner situation is not made conscious, it appears outside as fate." Karl Jung~
When you aggregate all science and engineering, I would be surprised if The WestTM didn't come in somewhere between a 60/40 and an 80/20 male/female ratio.
