Comments on: Tropposphere

By: lauredhel

lauredhel — Sat, 17 May 2008 14:30:17 +0000

I must admit, I laughed at this

I can’t, by rights, take any credit for it, however: it’s straight from thebewilderness’ comment, origin unknown but possibly somewhere from the IBTP fora.

By: Jacques Chester

Jacques Chester — Sat, 17 May 2008 03:54:35 +0000

the Troppodilians have a perfect right to immerse themselves in Fresh Manly Wisdom,

I must admit, I laughed at this

By: jason

jason — Tue, 13 May 2008 11:02:50 +0000

Fair enough, and as I said in the last comment, your points are all very well made.

By: lauredhel

lauredhel — Tue, 13 May 2008 11:00:04 +0000

There are probably plenty of other terms; “sidekicks” is the one that sprang to mind. What do you call contributors that aren’t equal co-bloggers? “Sub-bloggers”?

The women bloggers at LP are fabulous (they know I know that!), but the project as a whole is fairly obviously Mark’s baby - he’s the one with his name on the homepage, he’s the one looking to make money from donations, and so on. I don’t have a problem with any of that, but I couldn’t rightly categorise it as a “woman-headed” blog.

By: jason

jason — Tue, 13 May 2008 05:59:38 +0000

These points are well made. They’re especially important because, despite the disclaimers, I guess this will be a fairly widely-referenced representation of Australian blogging.

I’m not sure how the women on LP would feel about being nominated as “sidekicks”, though! And I’m not sure if men dominate the posting there. Oh, and Sarah from the Voice of Today’s Apathetic Youth does at least half the posts there, as far as I can tell.

By: lauredhel

lauredhel — Tue, 13 May 2008 05:15:14 +0000

Of the blogs where I could clearly identify a “head” or “co-head”, and where the likely gender of the head was identifiable, I’m getting a ratio approaching ten to one. Whee, summit chair nostalgia! This is after excluding the big commercial news sites, which are of course overwhelmingly blokey. Numbers are not precise, and I may have misidentified here and there, though that’s not going to change the overall impression much if at all.

Women are concentrated in the Arts (though they don’t predominate) and in Law (I’m not sure if that’s skepticlawyer’s influence), and are virtually absent in the political/economic selections. In politics, there are the women sidekicks at male-headed LP, and three blogs where I couldn’t identify the gender, but otherwise it’s blokes all the way down. Even in the international political blogs, blogs like Shakesville and HuffPo were overlooked.

This is what the Troppo folk find “interesting” and “notable”. I’m not going to mount some sort of protest about it - such judgements are, obviously, subjective, the Troppodilians have a perfect right to immerse themselves in Fresh Manly Wisdom, and the subjectivity of their criteria is declared up front - but there’s no denying it’s a glaring imbalance.