Gender Differences in the Academic Blogosphere

Over this weekend, I decided that it was vitally important to switch my rss feeders. I had to move all my blog feeds from Bloglines to Google Reader that minute and put aside the article review, the student recommendation, and the paper draft. Yes, I can prioritize.

Setting things up on Google Reader was quite fun. Some blogs, like mine, actually look better in that format. I've really got to fix up my design here. I also used their recommendations to find new blogs.

I spent some time in the academic blogosphere and was struck by the huge differences between blogs written by men and those written by women.

The guys used their blogs as a way to advertise their research. They used their full names. They used statistics with bravado. The audience for their blogs was other academics. The focus of their blog was only work.

The female academic bloggers were entirely different. They blogged pseudonymously. They talked about work, but may have spent more time talking about their kids or their hobbies (cooking, food, entertainment, books, photography). Their blogs expressed both the joys and the frustrations of academic life. The audience for their blogs was often larger than academia.

I haven't witnessed these huge difference in other areas of the blogosphere. The female political bloggers use their real names - Ann Althouse, Ana Marie Cox, Laura Rosen. The mom bloggers use their real names. Men and women, in these other blogospheres, did take some different spins on topics, but there was a much wider gulf in the academic blogosphere.

What does it all mean? I suppose you could look at it in a positive light. Women academics have broader interests and understand the importance of a life outside of work. But I'm a little blue this morning and these differences feel a little sad to me. Like women need a safe zone to talk about their family and their interests.

Comments

[Libby Gruner]

i agree that it seems a little sad. There are some academic blogs by women that are purely or mostly academic and that do use real names (The Little Professor is one I used to read) but I don't really find purely academic blogs (at least in my field) all that interesting. I read many more of the ones in the interstices, and I like the mix that the female bloggers seem more likely to take one. I'm only partly pseudonymous, myself--since I link to my not-anonymous writing, it's easy enough to find me. And all the Mama, PhD bloggers at IHE use their own names--but then again, as you pointed out, they're mom-bloggers, too. Hmm. No answers here--but an interesting post.

[JennG]

Do you think it's related to tenure - for example are the tenured bloggers more likely to use their own names? Maybe fewer women have achieved tenure status?

[laura]

But tenured male bloggers behave nearly the same way as untenured male bloggers. Their blogs do not discuss juggle diaper changing and grading papers regardless of their tenure status.

Maybe it's because women still have most of the responsibility for kids, because women have kids at the same time as they have to get tenure, because they can't talk about these things at work.

[Emma Jane]

Some now-becoming-famous-in-their-field (and certainly tenured) guys I knew in grad school have started writing blogs under their own names, or only lightly anonymized, that fully span the professional/personal spectrum: from here's-my-next-talk to my-toddler-is cute-but-annoying to restaurant-review to political-snark and back to professionally relevant things, from entry to entry to entry.

I found I was terribly, terribly jealous of them for doing so -- much more sharply than I would be simply for their professional success.

Still, the blogs can read a little like a hubristic display of the author's feminism -- or something; maybe I'm not sure what I mean here, or maybe it's just my jealousy coming through again. "Look! I just got poached from one R1 to another, and I pick out my kid's cloth diapers myself, and I listen to hipper music than you!" Having it all indeed.

[New Kid on the Hallway]

I'm a little surprised that you mention these differences because I associate you with academic blogging (I first found you through academic blogs, probably first through Invisible Adjunct) and these differences have been pretty clearly acknowledged almost since I've been blogging. And most of the women bloggers I've seen talk about it have suggested that it's because they both find it harder to balance life/work issues, and believe that as women, they'll be taken less seriously if they discuss anything other than work in their professional context. It's an attempt to question the academic demands that you be nothing other than your work, at the same time as not wanting to address it under your real name, because, duh. (That "duh" is meant as a comment on academia, not you!)

[laura]

Yeah, you're right, NK. Work/life balance and the one dimensional face of academia are key. In the early years, I did a lot of blogging about that, and now that everybody knows my name, I've done less of that. I was just checking out new blogs and finding that the pattern still exists. Don't guys have any gripes with academia?

[New Kid on the Hallway]

I'm sure they must. But honestly, I read REALLY few male academic bloggers. It's kind of sad. (I tend to avoid the "all work" academic blogs because, well, just not that interested!) Gayprof and Oso Raro are the two male academic bloggers I can think of who raise many of the same issues as the pseudonymous female academic bloggers, and who are also pseudonymous (also Horace at To Delight and Instruct, though he's less critical than the former two), and I don't think it's a coincidence that they're both gay (and both Latino, I think).

So either straight white male academics really honestly don't have the same problems with academia that women/queers/faculty of color do, or their roles are that much more constraining, that they don't write about them. Or some combination thereof. Maybe.

[laura]

Sleeping on it, I've changed my mind a bit. There are some very good academic blogs from guys that do deviate from the all work or showing off variety. And these blogs have been on my blogroll for a long time. Sam Crane writes eloquently about his son, Aidan. I love whenever Michael Berube writes about his son, Jamie. Tim Burke writes fun pieces about technology and pop culture.

[MH]

This came to mind today when I read that my favorite local blogger, PittGirl, just quit. Not that she had an academic or mom blog. From her good-bye notice, it sounds like someone had broken her anonymity and that this either threatened her employment or that she had a threatening stalker. Anyway, her readership was enough to give her sufficient pull to get the local newspaper to increase its bandwidth by complaining about the load speed.