In the last week or so I’ve been reading some blog posts that were written in the aftermath of the Science Online conference that just took place in the US last week. Lots of interesting topics were covered all centred around the themes of science communication, research and the web, and the state of the blogosphere. One particular panel session has gathered a number of interesting blog posts – it was called “Perils of blogging as a woman under a real name”, led by Sheril Kirschenbaum, Anne Jefferson, Joanne Manaster, Maryn McKenna and Kathryn Clancy. You can read some good coverage here, here and here.
The panelists and participants discussed some of the problems that women face when they have a public web presence, like this one. They open themselves up to criticism that can feel gendered or sexist on their blogs, and may have their commitment to hard science questioned in their jobs. One interesting comment that all the posts discussing this panel have highlighted, is that women bloggers do less self-promotion than men.
I sometimes get requests to retweet posts, and I usually oblige – but it’s true that I’ve only ever had such requests from men. I’ve never asked anyone specifically to retweet or promote any of my posts either. Commenting is another thing: this blog doesn’t get a large number of comments on the whole, but when I checked, I found very few (single digits!) comments by women that I didn’t have some sort of strong real-life connection with already. That’s a little odd. I suppose to judge the significance of that, I should know the gender ratio of the people who actually read this blog. Can you tell me?
[polldaddy poll=4458553]
[Note: I'll keep the poll open until 10 pm on Friday 4 Feb - in case you need time to think about it.]
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