Gender and blogging

Why is food blogging so dominated by women? I don’t have exact results on this question back yet so I cannot tell you precisely how female-dominated the food blogs are, but I would confidently bet that 85% or more are written by women.

So that got me thinking: are blogs in general female-dominated?

I already knew that was not true – political blogs and tech blogs are often written by men. But I wanted to know with some evidence better than my own hunch just what the gender balance in blogging is overall. As you can see above, it’s pretty evenly split these days. About 14% of women and 14% of men contributed to their own blog or online journal the last time Pew asked that question. This shows us that blogging itself is not the gendered-gate. Equal amounts of men and women are making it into the practice of blogging but the content they blog is refracted through a gendering lens. Women appear to dominate not only food blogs but also baby blogs (aka mommy blogs), fashion blogs, and design blogs. Men appear to dominate political and tech blogs.

This study is not the only one that comes in and disproves the idea that cyber communities are doing the work of revolutionizing gender practice. But it will offer another drop in the bucket. Thanks to Pew’s long-standing commitment to researching the internet, I can at least assure myself in this case, that it isn’t technology itself which produces gendered practices. Women and men are equally likely to post blogs. They just end up in gender-homogenous topical arenas in the blogosphere.