Gender Politics in the Blogosphere. There might be an equal number of men and women writing weblogs but the data suggests that men are heard more. Analysis of the blogrolls of the ten most popular weblogs reveals that men are consistently blogrolled more often than women. A commenter remarked that since the "A-list" is primarily manufactured by men, then women should just stop clamoring to get on it and form their own list. This is not so easy. I suspect that the number of readers are rather limited if you ignore all the Google searches and it would be difficult for a new "A-list" to get a foothold when the other "A-list" is already established.
I thought the number of Blog Sisters who responded to the survey was rather meager. If it was anything to go by, it was mostly a bunch of 40-year-old women who are well-educated yet think that they're not good enough to get on the A-list. It sort of correlates with the documentation of a blogosphere brouhaha where a female blogger apologized for ranting about how male bloggers only linked to her when she wrote about sex. Both indicate that women bloggers believe that this inequality in the blog community is due to their own fault.
I'm all for admitting one's own mistakes, but good grief, shouldering all the wrongs in the world is taking Chodorow's theory of mothering to the extreme. I'm sure there are people who are not popular even if they write like Pulitzer Prize winners. Weblogs are a lot like books. Bestsellers of both are manipulated by the establishment and to put it bluntly, most readers are too dumb and too lazy to find other stuff out there.
