In his post The
gender profile of Wikipedia Joi ito writes
I haven’t conducted any scientific analysis or anything, but Wikipedia seems much
more gender balanced than the blogging community. I know many people point
out that ratio of men at conferences on blogging and ratio of men who have loud blog
voices seems to be quite high.
The core mistake in the assumption Joi Ito makes here is in assuming that participation
is equivalent to talking about participation. I’ve seen several statistics and surveys
on blogosphere (God, I hate that word) participation which all seem to point to the
same conclusion; the number of female bloggers tends to outnumber the number
of male bloggers.
For example, according to the LiveJournal
statistics page there twice as many females blogging as males in that community.
Given that LiveJournal is one of the oldest and largest blogging communities with
almost 2 million active blogs (and almost 5 million user accounts) I think this
counts for a lot more than claiming that a lot of women aren’t seen at geeky
conferences like Web 2.0 or Tim O’Reilly’s FooCamp.
O
…excerpt from: Dare Obasanjo aka Carnage4Life