VictoriaMara

Women and Children Last

Women and Children Last
"Guernsey (2002) claims, on the basis of informal observation, that 40-50% of bloggers are women. At least one report (Orlowski, 2003) goes further, asserting that a majority of bloggers are teenage girls.

What percentage of blog authors are females and teens? To address this question, we conducted a gender- and age-focused content analysis of a random sample of 357 blogs collected from the largest available blog tracking site.

We collected blogs twice, six months apart, as part of a larger ongoing longitudinal analysis of the weblog genre. At the times of our data collection, in March 2003 and in September 2003, the blo.gs site was tracking a total of roughly 350,00 and 700,000 blogs, respectively.

We used the site's “random” selection feature to collect two samples from these totals: the first containing 203 blogs, and the second containing 154 blogs."

The information was gathered by the random searches that where done. They then went through each blog and found any thing that woudl indicate the sex or age of the bloger and they where able to find the information most of the time.

March 2003
September 2003
Total

Male
100 (54%)
64 (48%)
164 (52%)

Female
84 (46%)
68 (52%)
152 (48%)

Total
184 (100%)
132 (100%)
316 (100%)

Ages of the blogers
March 2003
September 2003
Total

Adult
111 (60%)
49 (37%)
160 (51%)[5]

Emerging
--
33 (25%)
33 (10%)

Teen
73 (40%)
50 (38%)
123 (39%)

Total
184 (100%)
132 (100%)
316 (100%)

There are more teen female blogers then male teen blogers but there are more adult male blogers then adult female blogers.

Age and sex is also skewed for the type of blog that is created. A journal type blog is most popular for teen females and adult males take over the rest.

Mass Media Reports
more males (88%) are mentioned in the articles than females (12%);
males are mentioned multiple times in the same article more often than females;
males are mentioned earlier in the articles than females;
males are more likely to be mentioned by name than females; and
all 94 males mentioned are adults, except for one adolescent male blogger

Weblog Scholarship
Scholarship on weblogs is still in its infancy, so there is little published literature as yet. However, some scholarly activities associated with weblogs already show evidence of an adult male bias. Conferences to discuss weblogs have thus far tended to attract more male than female participants.

twelve out of sixteen papers (75%) presented in the four sessions dedicated to weblogs were authored by men, and males made up roughly 70% of the audience who attended those sessions

Posted by VictoriaMara at November 18, 2004 8:16 PM