Celebrated science bloggers are primarily male.
Discuss.
—
*Note added retrospectively: I have been asked why I have not included self-organizing, grassroots blogging collectives, or indeed Nature Network itself, on this graph. The reason is because I was interested in the composition of high-profile collectives driven by prominent media outlets who are cherry-picking a select few independent power-bloggers. Hence the word ‘celebrated’, which was used ironically. -JR, 16.35 15/09/2010
Apologies if someone said this up there already, I haven’t read through all the comments again.
I just wanted to make a suggestion: if you can’t find great women in the top ranks (because there aren’t many, and maybe those who are there hesitate) – why not try looking in the ‘second ranks’ as well? My bet is that you’ll be surprised how many fantastically skilled ladies you will find who just haven’t had the chance yet to show their worth at a higher level.
Yes, this is related to the ‘quote question’, but that’s not quite it. It’s just about looking harder for hidden quality.
I wonder what the overall gender ratio is among science bloggers? There are listings, shouldn’t be too hard to find out… That would be the first question in figuring out if either gender is "celebrated" disproportionately.
That’s a good point, Sarah. Just to be clear, I wasn’t necessarily suggesting that there is an equal pool and these established venues are choosing men over women – which is only one hypothesis.
(Runs away)
I heart that signage.
Is that a mosque?
I took the picture in a roadside emporium that stocks garden ornaments, old railway signage and so on, so I don’t know its provenance. Sadly.
there was a study published recently (that, sadly, i merely glanced over due to my chronic and ongoing lack of internet access, except when i manage to use starbux free wifi), that seemed to say that, in the twittersphere, women are the better "networkers" and are more likely to retweet other people’s stuff but had far fewer followers than men. it would seem that the twittersphere and blogosphere may be a sad reflection of reality in general.
or something like that.
Wow, it took me about 10 attempts to log in. Blech.
And ouch: I hope there’s some good explanation for your observation, Jenny! So who will trawl through the data on science bloggers in general?
See also science journalism and science book writing. Not that there aren’t many brilliant female science writers in all these areas… I wonder if with these networks part of the problem isn’t just pool but also the classic thing of women not putting themselves forward for stuff (and people reccomending/ thinking of men because men have been better at networking in the past). Perhaps also, for blogging, more women are happy to be independent rather than this odd thing sci bloggers do of forming clubs (female dominated blogosophere I hang out in, knitting, has ways of demonstrating community and connections, but doesn’t feel the need to set up in within brands in the same way).
Not me, alas, Steffi – I have a revolution to plot in my (so-called) "spare time".
(The "add link" icon is greyed out so I can’t do it prettily, but I meant to hyperlink the words "revolution to plot" pointing to this –> http://blogs.nature.com/ue19877e8/2010/09/08/in-which-the-great-slumbering-scientific-beast-awakens . Can’t be arsed to code it in html manually. Let’s pretend it’s retro-chic.)
Explanations? The majority of scientific commenters are male, whether in print or broadcast. If you look in the Times’ Eureka, pretty much all the people giving their weighty opinions are men. (I haven’t seen a single woman in these sorts of features, though I haven’t read all the issues.) At our ScienceIsVital brainstorm session, nobody could think of a single respected female scientist in the UK on the same level as Hawking et al. Even Cox-equivalents are thin in the ground – Alice Roberts and…and…
So I guess why should celebrated science bloggers show different demographics? As spokepeople for science, we seem, as a collective group, to turn to men.
Alice, our posts crossed, so part of what I said was redundant. Yes, the networking thing might be key here. Still, I’d argue that, via Twitter, female science bloggers are networking like hell, but are they being invited to blogging collectives? Not really.
Extremely disappointing!
As far as Alice’s comment goes, the proportion of science writers who are female is, I would suggest, significantly higher than the proportion of science bloggers (perhaps because many science bloggers are scientists, not science writers), and while it depends on what you mean by celebrated, I don’t see any particular correlation on my popular science book review site between being highly rated and gender.
I think I have said this before, but. hey, the old ones are the best.
Many years ago when the world was young I ran a one-page questionnaire-style feature in Nature called ‘Lifelines’ in which I asked scientists impertinent questions about their bedtime reading and the contents of their fridges. The column was by invitation only, and although I was absolutely scrupulous in inviting equal numbers of men and women, I ended up publishing fewer items from women – so much so that I was actually accused of sexism.
It turned out that to achieve parity at publication, I had to ask about twice as many female scientists as men to contribute. Female scientists invariably provided interesting copy, but were far less likely to respond positively (or at all) to invitations to contribute, and even if they did respond positively, were less likely to deliver. Why should this be? I think there are two reasons, both of which are pertinent to blogging.
First, I suspect that female scientists might be more reticent about discussing their personal lives in public than male scientists.
Second, I suspect that female scientists have more things to do than male scientists. Quite apart from the well-rehearsed differences in lifestyle, domestic duties and so on, I have a sense that women scientists spend a lot of their work time serving on committees and panels than male scientists – given that female scientists are relatively rare, and panels will try to ensure gender equality, or at least some representation rather than none.
Good points, Henry, but on this issue only: "First, I suspect that female scientists might be more reticent about discussing their personal lives in public than male scientists."
I would argue that the majority of science bloggers write about science, not about themselves. The confessional style that you and I emply is relatively rare – most write on data and published research. So that can’t be the explanation. Also, we first need to establish whether the pool to choose from is really that skewed.
I also think that a high-profile mag like Wired or Discover probably has the reach and prestige to attract more women who actually can deliver (even if that means asking more than the number they ultimately require). I just wonder how hard they tried – or if it even occurred to them that some people notice and care about things like this.
Or maybe the world really is post-gender and it doesn’t matter if most science bloggers are male, provided they are good.
Brian, I’ve been to a number of Royal Society book prize ceremonies – small sample size – but it was my impression that most of the shortlist have been men. Is that not true? (Sorry, too busy to look all of the past ones up – and caveat, I didn’t pay attention this year.)
Re Henry’s last remark, suspect the female scientists he approached might also have been instinctively wary (more so than the men) about doing anything that might have remotely appeared "fluffy" or PR-ish – for the sort of "needing to be seen to be serious to be taken seriously" reasons.
Let’s not forget that a lot of science bloggers are no longer practicing scientists, so they will not be subject to the contraints of academic in this regard.
In support of Henry’s comment, there’s a fair amount of anecdotal evidence regarding the gender imbalance on journal editorial boards that this reflects (to some extent) low take-up by female invitees (although there is almost certainly some unconscious bias on the part of the inviters too). I’ve had similar problems trying to get female ecologists to write for a kind of autobiographical, ‘bits of ecology that inspired me’ feature we do for the British Ecological Society – we aim for more senior people (prof level, basically), which cuts the sample size of women; and those whom we do ask frequently are too busy…
With respect, this is so not a fair comparison. Science bloggers blog to write and to get their word out to as many people as possible. Moving to a high-octane network wouldn’t result in any more work, different from what they are already doing. Do you really think a successful, prolific, praoctive, dynamic female science blogger would say, no thanks, Wired, I’d rather languish here in obscurity than do exactly the same activity on your massive-readership site?
Comparing it to a thankless job like editorial board membership (or committees, or whatever) that suck away time from what one wants to do it not really on.
Not convinced.
Is this just constrained to science blogging? Anyone have any stats for the ratios of male/female science TV presenters, for example? As in, is this a phenomenon that’s constrained to the written word when doing sci comm or is it a more general trend?
Just pointing out some parallels, like. Which may influence who starts blogging in the first place (it can be a reasonably large commitment of time away from what most of us are paid to do), which will knock on to who ends up with the high profile blogs. Maybe.
Do you really think a successful, prolific, practive, dynamic female science blogger would say, no thanks, Wired, I’d rather languish here in obscurity than do exactly the same activity on your massive-readership site?
The women (and men) I asked to contribute to Lifelines were successful, proactive, and dynamic – because these were the ones my colleagues and I felt would have more interesting tales to tell. Indeed, female scientists often had more interesting and varied tales than male scientists – and funnier.
You’d have thought an invitation to boost their profile in Nature, rather than serve on the editorial board of the Journal of Obscurology would have been seen as an opportunity, and I suspect male respondents thought of it that way – but I got the sense that female scientists were warier of the reactions they might get to such activities, and would, on the whole, have rated ‘languishing in obscurity’ as a less worse option. That, and not having the time.
I should have said that my questionnaires did include quite a lot of serious questions – about the mentors that inspired them the lessons they’d like their students to learn, and so on.
Henry, you were still asking scientists who don’t do writing as a regular thing – who are by definition uber-busy and, as Austin points out, not wanting to be seen as distracted.. If you had asked female science bloggers (those who already choose to devote a lot of time to public writing), would similar numbers have demurred?
Tom – yeah, I know what you meant. But I really think we need to keep in mind the mentality of a blogger here – and would they object to blogging for a better place if it were the same amount of work? (Caveat: possibly the big players are asking bloggers to blog more regularly and then busy women might have had to demur.)
I’d like to just wade in here on behalf of The Guardian.
I was the first blogger on board at The Guardian, and involved in the process of selecting the other bloggers. I was very conscious of the gender divide at ScienceBlogs. We tried to get an even number of men and women (and a diverse set of voices in general, which I think is at least as important if not more so). The reason we don’t is through really no fault of our own – we tried hard, and 1 in 4 is what we ended up with (although we do still hope to address that in the coming months as more bloggers join).
I think the make-up of blogging networks is symptomatic of a wider gender bias in science blogging, in which women seem to struggle to get the same recognition as men, and a number of those who do seem to end up clustered around certain topics. That’s problematic because for a new network at a national newspaper you need reasonably high profile names and a variety of topic coverage. Add to that in the Guardian’s case the desire for a largely British voice, and the fact that there are actually very few really good science bloggers in the world to begin with, and the options shrink quite quickly. With all of those excuses we still had a pretty good balance, but there were various (quite reasonable) issues with the specific people we approached – one was concerned about retaining an independent voice for example.
As an aside, it’s fascinating that you say "Do you really think a successful, prolific, practive, dynamic female science blogger would say, no thanks, Wired, I’d rather languish here in obscurity than do exactly the same activity on your massive-readership site?"
…because yes, they sometimes do.
It’s something we’re actively fighting, and I want to try and give a platform especially to some of the newer, less recognized women in science blogging – I’ve had a lot of success at layscience with that approach.
So possibly a constructive way of dealing with this would be for people to start championing under-recognized women science bloggers and writers. I don’t have time this week, but if anyone is willing to help put together a list, I’ll certainly put it up at the Guardian blog with some discussion.
For what it’s worth (sparked by comment at the other place), I have no difficulty finding women to agree to do interviews for The Scientist magazine. They’re far more likely to respond then their XY counterparts, to be honest.
Martin, fair points all and again, I was just speculating – mostly reflecting on what I myself, as a female blogger, would do if I were poached. Of course every one of us is different, and it’s good to remember that. It’s actually interesting that a high-profile female turned you down to remain independent – I wonder if the skewed stats in my graph are all due to refusals? Meanwhile, you’re offer of helping to big up good female bloggers is very generous.
It’s actually interesting that a high-profile female turned you down to remain independent – I wonder if the skewed stats in my graph are all due to refusals?
My gut feeling is that it’s due to the networks chasing a smaller pool of well known women bloggers, resulting in increased competition (hence Grrlscientist being on about umpteen networks now), but it would be interesting to find out for sure.
I like what you said about Lay Scientist nurturing lesser-known bloggers. It’s probably not a strategy that a high-profile platform can employ, though. The Guardian’s blogging festival is obviously a step in the right direction, which might help bring some women bloggers to the attention of other media types, as well. Guest posters on well-known blogs will also help – as the Guardian’s regular bloggers are also doing.
On that note, everyone go read Karen’s wonderful Beagle post!
http://bit.ly/drZOpO
Could be worse. They could be German networks: http://www.wissenslogs.de/wblogs/summary.php
What’s the stat? Some of us have experiments to do! 😉
Richard: don’t even get me started.
My suspected reason for women turning down invitations and shying away from "standing out": wariness – this was hinted at in comments by Austin and Henry above. If you constantly have to stand your own ground, twice as hard as those (men) around you, you get worn down.
Having said that, I’m not sure if this really applies to bloggers, who are out there doing stuff in public anyway. {thinks}
Yes, I hear you about the wearing down thing. I agree with you that this would not necessarily apply to bloggers, especially in cases where appearing on a big platform (as I said above) would not be a bigger time commitment than what they already spend blogging independently.
One difference (big platform vs small / independent) might be frequency of blogging. As an independent you might AIM for regular posting, but there is no compulsion to do it apart from your own desire to do it. On a big platform there might be much more expectation that you are going to produce something regularly. Certainly I had understood (via the Interwebz/whispers) that the people at Scienceblogs in time past were expected to post something like two or three times a week.
Yes, I mentioned that above. There could well be more pressure in those cases, but I like to think that most women would rise to the challenge. Still, I could very well be wrong. I personally would like to have a bigger audience, but I shouldn’t assume that all women would.
On a different but tangentially related question, how many gay and "out" science bloggers are there? I know very few, but would love to know more.
I’m one on PLoS, legally married to my science-teacher husband in California:
http://blogs.plos.org/neurotribes
But I’ve only heard of one or two others.
No idea! But a good question.
Does anyone know the number of male/female bloggers at Scientopia, Scienceblogs, Nature Network?
Women were also clearly underrepresented among the Science Online London conference speakers (7 female, 34 male, not looking at the unconference sessions). We have to do much better next year.
Hmm, I can think of 3 science bloggers I know to be gay, but I’m not sure if they’re all out on-blog.
Women are under-represented. Period. For example, I recently read an interesting piece plus statistic about how males are invited to review books by males, but not females. Whereas if a book is by a female, a female is at least as likely to review as a male.
I simply do not buy any argument from commissioning editors about it being harder to find female authors/writers. I have commissioned more articles than most people have had hot dinners. I would say that if a commissioning ed simply goes for the "usual suspects" who are known by reputation, you are going for a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you are a commissioning ed who is prepared to ask around a bit, and/or do a bit of research, there are plenty of women who can write/feature in profiles, etc.
But, this whole topic by no means applies to science, it is everywhere. Look at obits in newspapers, for example. Men are just quite good at blowing their own, er, trumpets and everyone else is just a bit gullible about it. (Possibly because it is nice and easy to be gullible.)
All I can say in sum is, "thank you, Jenny." You see it like it is.
But this is back to the old scientific chestnut of "Of what underlying population are this selected sample supposed to be representative?". This regularly turns up in discussions of how many female FRSes there are, or how many female Professors in a given Department. The Royal Society typically comment that the (depressingly small) proportion of female Fellows roughly matches the proportion of female full Professors (ditto) in the sciences. So if the population of science bloggers were 80% male, say, then striving to have 50% female speakers in a conference on science blogging would actually be unrepresentative.
Note that I’m not at all suggesting that science bloggers ARE 80% male. I guess I would imagine science blogging is pretty evenly split, and hence Jenny’s comments about the male-heavy nature of the high-profile networks are very apposite. But we have to be careful about insisting on being representative while actually not being representative. What we are doing then is making a different point (though a perfectly valid one) about equality.
From my personal perspective as a conference ATTENDER, I don’t care if the speakers are male, female, gay, bi/curious, Martian, whatever. I’m only interested in whether they give an interesting and entertaining talk, preferably one I haven’t heard them give before, and stick to the time limit. On which bases, there were one or two "speaker selection fails" at Solo2010, as I think all of us who were there would agree.
Going back to science bloggers, I would guess that if you limited your count to “bloggers who were also tenured or otherwise permanently-employed research scientists”, then that would be much more male-heavy group than “science bloggers” in general. But that would largely be a reflection of the general leakage of women out of science as you go up the seniority ladder, something on which countless column inches have been expended.
"Of what underlying population are this selected sample supposed to be representative?" I wasn’t counting, but the gender ratios of the Science Online participants seemed pretty even. So if you were playing to that audience, you might want to be more participatory with speaker choice.
Austin, I know it shouldn’t matter if speakers/bloggers/professors are all male, as long as they are good. But to me, as a woman in an audience/fellow blogger/academic, if I don’t see any evidence that women are wanted or appreciated in the sphere to which I’m aspiring, I get discouraged. I don’t think this is a particularly surprising reaction. I think it must be very hard for a male in science to know how it feels to sit through a symposium in your field and watch ten men, and no women, give talks. It shouldn’t matter – but it does.
Interesting thread. Particularly because it seems as though among the new and young science writers I meet, the majority are women. Anecdotally, I know that the MIT Graduate Program in Science Writing (from which I graduated four years ago), has a hell of a time getting enough male students. In a class of seven, it’s considered an accomplishment to have two men. (Though perhaps this is more about the fact that women outnumber men in higher education.)
What I’d be interested in seeing is a breakdown by field. What percentage of psychology bloggers are female versus physics bloggers? Maybe the overall percentage is being dragged down by underrepresentation in just a few fields? (Not that that makes it any better, of course–just curious about whether the problem might be narrower than "science blogs," in general.)
On another note, I think that even today, something like blogging, where you just put your opinions out there for the world to see (and, in the process, presume that people care about what you have to say) goes against how a lot of girls are still socialized–to be nice, to get along, to be team members rather than leaders, etc. Sure, we’ve made progress, but I still think that boys are more likely to speak up, to criticize others, to assume that their opinions matter. All of which seem to have something to do with blogging.
Emily – and this goes back to the pundit thing, that the vast amjority of scientists expressing opinions on TV and in newspapers – the spokespeople of our field – are male. I think it sounds more serious coming from a man’s mouth: I don’t know why, but all the evidence points that way.
This doesn’t give me a good feeling, as a woman, either, that no-one wants to hear my opinion solely because I don’t have a Y chromosome.
I wonder if it is partly what Henry mentioned before "many female scientist do lots of things" (and maybe adding ‘not too much free time for themselves’) but in reality I wonder if it isn’t more of a cost-benefit ratio (and why women, if asked are more prone to say no [or this might be anecdotal too?].
I mean, blogging from one of those bigger platforms will let more people read you and your views. That means, more people will be able to write the "tacky and complaining" comments that you can receive as a blogger. The latter a bit more common as a female blogger – there is some kind of reference here but I can’t find it in regards to the more disrespectful comments).
Therefore, the risk of writing something that isn’t "as good" (or as in line with main stream) that will draw out non-supportive or non-interested comments is higher when linked to one of those big platform. And the benefit might be less obvious in light of the risk/cost?
I don’t know, I freely admit, I am shooting a bit in the dark here … but I know that I would love to know the connection/correlation between the “non-equal”* ratio of male: females and the science aspect in media (TV/blogs/profs/in general) since I am not sure on how unequal it is, or what drives it.
*for lack of better description, 60:40 or what have you… it might not be 90:10 (as 1 woman out of 10 would be) since, as mentioned before, maybe the pool of possible female science bloggers are fewer and really it is 1 woman out of 4 potential and then 10 out of 100 potential males… However, I personally wonder that this is true, since my blog roll is full of female scientists. Granted though, not all of them write solely about science…. and maybe that is one of the “problems” maybe being one of the prerequisites for running a science blog?
wow, sorry about that. The comment is unreadable. I’ll see if this works out better?
I wonder if it is partly what Henry mentioned before "many female scientist do lots of things" (and maybe adding ‘not too much free time for themselves’) but in reality I wonder if it isn’t more of a cost-benefit ratio (and why women, if asked are more prone to say no [or this might be anecdotal too?].
I mean, blogging from one of those bigger platforms will let more people read you and your views. That means, more people will be able to write the "tacky and complaining" comments that you can receive as a blogger. The latter a bit more common as a female blogger – there is some kind of reference here but I can’t find it in regards to the more disrespectful comments).
Therefore, the risk of writing something that isn’t "as good" (or as in line with main stream) that will draw out non-supportive or non-interested comments is higher when linked to one of those big platform. And the benefit might be less obvious in light of the risk/cost? I don’t know, I freely admit, I am shooting a bit in the dark here … but I know that I would love to know the connection/correlation between the “non-equal”* ratio of male: females and the science aspect in media (TV/blogs/profs/in general) since I am not sure on how unequal it is, or what drives it.
*for lack of better description, 60:40 or what have you… it might not be 90:10 (as 1 woman out of 10 would be) since, as mentioned before, maybe the pool of possible female science bloggers are fewer and really it is 1 woman out of 4 potential and then 10 out of 100 potential males… However, I personally wonder that this is true, since my blog roll is full of female scientists. Granted though, not all of them write solely about science…. and maybe that is one of the “problems” maybe being one of the prerequisites for running a science blog?
Very insightful comments, Asa. You might be right that some women don’t want the hassle of confrontation on a very visible platform. I mean, that sort of aggression is hard even for me as a non-involved reader, which is one of the reasons I ended up largely avoiding ScienceBlogs.
Seen this, while we’re at it?
Alas, nothing new under the sun.
I liked Maxine’s reaction, among many in the thread. With respect to this:
"Men are just quite good at blowing their own, er, trumpets and everyone else is just a bit gullible about it. (Possibly because it is nice and easy to be gullible.)"
It’s in part laziness on the part of feminist men and women (some of everyone else) that allows these imbalances to remain uncorrected. Jenny, you do more than your part to drawing attention to them, and I for one thank you.
Thanks, Heather. I’ve tweeted that link. I very much appreciate your kind words. In drawing attention to imbalances, we run the risk of coming across as rabid feminists…but hey, it’s great to have reached the age when I actually don’t care what people think of me. 😉
Wouldn’t it be a bit more honest to just admit women love woo? anti-woo blogging just isn’t going to attract many women, even when (as with health sciences) women outnumber men.
Wouldn’t it be a bit more honest to just admit women love woo? anti-woo blogging just isn’t going to attract many women, even when (as with health sciences) women outnumber men.
Wouldn’t it be a bit more honest to just admit women love woo? anti-woo blogging just isn’t going to attract many women, even when (as with health sciences) women outnumber men.
I think it’s more honest to admit that anti-woo blogging gets a little thin after a while.
True, but a lot of male bloggers don’t seem to have tired of it yet.
True, but a lot of male bloggers don’t seem to have tired of it yet.
True, but a lot of male bloggers don’t seem to have tired of it yet.
Thanks for posting, Jennifer. I’ve noticed this trend too. I’m with Emily—I graduated from NYU’s science writing program and every class is about 90 percent female, so it’s weird to see so few female bloggers. I agree, too, with Emily that it could have something to do with the leadership aspect of blogging—it’s a role that women haven’t really been socialized for. But I have to point out that a lot of my NYU class have become bloggers. It’s just that they are blogging about the environment, not about science. That’s just anecdotal, of course, but I find it interesting.
Probably because it’s guaranteed a lot of traffic, Alexis. If that’s what you want from a blog, fine.
@alexis "Women love woo"? All of us? Really? And no men do?
I’d love to see your proof for that outrageous, broad-sweeping generalization – feel free to send me your references. Until you do, I’m going to treat your comment as offensive, and any further reoccurences will result in moderation.
Some numbers for Nature Network:
Of the 52 bloggers who’ve blogged here in the past couple of months, 33 are male and 19 female.
Nature Network bloggers are largely recruited from people writing in and asking, rather than NN actively going out and seeking (although there are a handful of exceptions).
Melinda, thanks for your comment. It’s interesting what you say that more of your female colleagues seem to be blogging about the environment than science proper. Again, I’d love to see a topical breakdown of the blogosphere in general; I’m sure it would provide a lot of food for thought.
Matt, thanks for the stats! That’s interesting.
Jenny, this is – as always on your blog – a very good discussion. As a male blogger I of course wonder what I can do about it. Encourage female colleagues to blog? Highlight female bloggers on my own blog? Other ideas?
As for the Science Online London 2011 conference, I think it would be good to have more women involved in program planning.
Certainly plausible that women are greater consumers of woo than men are, and I’m pretty sure there is evidence to back this up. But (IMHO) that is largely a reflection of the way "looking/feeling your best" as a major life goal is targeted at women by advertising/culture/ consumerism, shurely?. Look, for instance, at the TV ads in the UK for things like probiotic yogurt drinks. Who are they targeted at? And pseudo-science-y cosmetics ads offer an even more obvious example.
And it wouldn’t explain the science blogger imbalance anyway, as a scientific education to at least first degree level (which most science bloggers have) is thankfully one of the better inoculations available against Woo-thusiasm.
Getting back to the central theme, the reason for the striking scarcity of female science bloggers on the big networks, it likely has multiple contributing factors/causes… this thread having flagged up many of them.
I also looked at the numbers for the Node, where some people just come in once to write on a very specific topic (meeting report, announce a job opening, etc.) and others are more regular contributors. Not counting the (almost by definition) all-female staff in the office, the breakdown of the people who have posted in the past 3 months is 10 female vs 12 male, but the more regular, returning contributors are twice as likely to be female than male.
Some of them were recruited, but not at all based on gender demographic. We pick people to cover certain topics, fields, and geographic areas (For example, I’m currently on the lookout for people working on plant models, anyone in Asia, and Europe-based stem cell biologists.) Some of them happen to be male, others female.
Of course, developmental biology is a very female-dominated field compared to other sciences, so maybe this isn’t so surprising in this niche. More than half of the developmental biology socities worldwide are being chaired by women… I can imagine that if I was looking for bloggers by the same kind of topic selection in another area of science, I’d struggle to find women simply because there wouldn’t be as many.
Any clue how the blog figures break down if you look at field-specific numbers?
Martin, I don’t think that more female organizers is the problem. You weren’t there, but I sat at a table at the British Library while we were planning the programme and noted that there were more women than men. That was about the time I said "Hey, there are no women on this programme." As a result, we got some very good speakers in—Aleks Krotoski for one.
The problem was that nobody had noticed, until then. Just as nobody noticed the imbalance in those blogging networks until Jenny said something.
It doesn’t just take women alone to notice these things, you know.
Martin, I think if high-octane male science bloggers on the big platforms occasionally gave guest post slots to up -and-coming, excellent women bloggers – and/or re-tweeted their home posts, it would go a long way towards giving them more name recognition.
Austin, re woo, I was objecting to the ‘woman like woo’ comment, stated as an absolute. It was an insult to me, as a female scientist, and to all of my female scientist/non-scientist rational readers. Alexis is free to have this opinion, but I don’t appreciate it being aired in my salon. The percentage of woo-comsumers may be higher than male woo-consumers, that doesn’t explain why excellent female science bloggers aren’t being recruited to the big platforms, which is the topic of this thread.
Eva, I wonder if you are getting a lot of women also because your commissioning editors are female?
(blast to the depths of hell the stupid MT4 feature that gives me two line breaks for every return!)
Richard, there have been some studies suggesting that a lot of inadvertent sexism in choices for speakers and other high-profile events just comes from men popping into the mind first. Both men and women are guilty of this. (Sorry I don’t have the links handy, but it’s in the book, Why So Slow referred to in this post: http://network.nature.com/people/UE19877E8/blog/2009/02/08/in-which-the-data-back-up-our-habitual-suspicions .) What is needed is a conscious, "OK, let’s not forget to think about female options"…and then all these great women spring into mind. It’s like there’s only room on the stage for men, but once you put them in the wings, your brain can see the whole picture.
Stupid poxy commenting system. Session expired and I lost the comment–even copied it so that wouldn’t happen.
BAH.
This was an important post (er, graph) and great comment thread. Thanks for being such a great moderator in this conversation, Jennifer.
I am a fairly new science blogger but have been reading them for many years. I have been disturbed by the trolls and attackers on women’s blogs on high profile networks, and think several commenters above are right that some women would be loathe to join a large network for this reason. Part of me wants that exposure, but another part of me doesn’t want to be attacked on a daily basis. Already, I deal with students who leave me anonymous, sexual notes in my classroom question box, I get comments about my body… and then I’m also fighting with the internalized sexism that says I need to please everyone by saying yes to every service and teaching obligation that comes my way. Add to that parenting a toddler and running a pretty large lab group staffed almost entirely by undergrads who need a lot of mentoring, and you have a tough situation.
-Kate
@KateClancy
Context and Variation
Kate – I hear you. Thanks for sharing your experiences, and it so sucks that people have been so rotten to you. I wonder if we will ever live in a world where the need for a comment thread like this will be unimaginable.
Anyway, this:
What is needed is a conscious, "OK, let’s not forget to think about female options".
and it needs to be men and women.
In fact, I think studies suggest that women are harder on their own sex than men are, when it comes to perceiving them positively (source, same book I alluded to above).
"I wonder if you are getting a lot of women also because your commissioning editors are female?"
I’m not sure if they’re aware of that. If I think many of them would not know the staff composition at all or have previously met some of our male (non-commissioning) editors and directors. And in everything else where I have to select people (speakers for events, contributors for other things, suggestions for SciFoo attendees, etc.) I always catch myself choosing only or mostly men (and then I feel bad, but then I decide that I really just picked who I thought would be best, and it’s okay if those people just happen to be male, and I don’t want to punish them for having a Y chromosome) but for the Node, with the same lack of consideration for gender, I end up with lots of women!
Awareness is definitely not a requirement when we make these sorts of selections.
Thanks Jenny. I think your post, and the comment thread, is very interesting! And yes, I find the amount of trolling/aggressive comments being much more common for female bloggers – not to mention the whole "do you really know that?" question.
If nothing else, I do wonder if “blogging” is the same as many of other high profile jobs/places – there are fewer women when you get towards the top; partly due to specilization (doing one thing and not having other stuf on the side multitasking), partly due to not loving the lime light since everyone will say something about you (and it will probably involve some nasty stuff too).
There are some studies, in media communication (I’ll see if I can dig up references – from a university in Florida,USA I think) in regards of how female [science] bloggers communicate with other female [science] bloggers – as in that the authors commented that most often women started buy "saying something positive about the post and then move on to the question". And built a supportive community sort of, although not visible community, where there were support and ideas thrown around. I wonder if this is correct, if that is one of the reasons why these female bloggers might not want (or rush to rather) to join the high profile networks?
Re Kate Clancy’s comments: I can think of at least two female bloggers whose comment threads are full of ‘trolls and attackers’, and whose policies seem to encourage such things, and yet these bloggers would probably blame this phenomenon on ‘the patriarchy’.
Therefore at the risk of attracting similar trolls and attackers, I’d like to advance a possibly radical thesis.
That men and women are different. That there is probably no single reason why there are more men than women science bloggers (and therefore to blame it on poor feeble-minded men is too simplistic). In which case, to seek equal representation in some cases (if not necessarily this one) seems very strange, even patronizing.
In support of my thesis I advance two examples. The first is a program for small kids called ‘Balamory’, ostensibly about a small community in the Inner Hebrides. This has rigorous equality of genders and representation of ethnic minorities and disabled people. This is all good and fine, but it is probably as bad a representation of a small community in the Inner Hebrides as if one had the harbour crawling with frummers from Stamford Hill. It’s just silly. Why didn’t they just call it ‘Birmingham’ and have done?
My second example is the long running radio 4 program ‘Farming Today’, to which I listen on my early morning commute through the dark fields of Norfolk. I remember when it was a real flat-cap program full of the latest spot prices for sheep and onions, subjects which the audience would find useful during morning milking or whatever. These days, however, the presenters are exclusively female (when farmers are overwhelmingly male to such a degree that many are bachelors and can’t find suitable brides from within the farming community), and the items often emote about the horrors of intensive farms and food that isn’t produced organically.
I expect that these two programs are produced with the best of PC intentions, by Guardian readers who live in Islington, but to this listener they seem very patronizing and arouse in me little more than cynicism – the producers seem less interested in the matter in hand than in social engineering.
As for me, I read blogs I find interesting and useful, irrespective of the gender of the writer. For the record, I have 30 entries on my blogroll, of which 17 are written by males, 9 by female, and the rest are written by a variety of writers or whose gender I don’t know. Neither do I care. If one were to suggest that I keep a rigorously gender-balanced blogroll for the sake of boosting the representation of one gender or another, they’d get a rude retort.
As they often do, the Pythons put it best.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sFBOQzSk14c
If you were a female blogger staring into the male abyss, Henry, you might possibly feel slightly differently about all this.
Just a hypothesis, mind.
One can ‘feel’ as much as one likes, but just wishing for something won’t make it so, especially if one wishes to impose one’s prejudices on a world in which things might occur for all sorts of reasons which one might find unwelcome, and which in any case don’t give two hoots for one’s prejudices in any case. Stan’s wish to have babies might indeed be ‘symbolic of our struggle against oppression’. However, I’m with Reg – it’s ‘symbolic of his struggle against reality’.
Who says I’m just wishing?
And my hypothesis that you being a female blogger might make you feel slightly less complacent about how things are is unaffected by anything you’ve said thus far. I’m sure it’s all very rosy from your perspective.
Just sayin’.
Rosy, schmosy, Loretta.
Well that’s me put eloquently in my place.
Martin "Eyes of a killer" Robbins has aggregated a (admittedly self-selected) list of female bloogers about sciency things at http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/the-lay-scientist/2010/sep/16/women-science-blogging.
I must say, I still find the idea of a female collective somewhat off-putting. It’s crying out NOT to be visited by men, for a start. I say, do the whole conscious thing Jenny was talking about above and have a happy mix.
(Fuck. Can you imagine if there were women-onyl newspapers? Oh, right, it’s called Marie Claire. See what I mean?)
Well that’s me put eloquently in my place
You’re supposed to be a scientist: you are supposed to find out how things are, not as you would want them to be. And while, we’re being scientific…
Let’s say that you’ve observed that 20% (say) of science bloggers are women. So what? This on its own is completely meaningless, and is not in itself a cause for concern unless you can work out what the expected proportion should be. There is no reason why this should be 50%. For all you know it could be 5% (for whatever reason), and the number of female science bloggers is greater than expected, in the same way that (I guess) women outnumber men in science publishing (at least in my experience). And it might so happen that the proportion of femal bloggers you observe doesn’t actually differ from the number expected, in which case no amount of high-minded good intentions will ever change this.
Perhaps most women have got better things to do with their time than argue with people who are wrong on the internet.
Playground joke;
BOY SCOUTS: Sir! We’ve just helped an old lady cross the road!
SCOUTMASTER: Well done, boys. But why did it take all ten of you?
BOY SCOUTS: She didn’t want to go, Sir.
Re that last comment, I think I said some of the same things earlier, Henry. Though without boy scouts.
"I must say, I still find the idea of a female collective somewhat off-putting. It’s crying out NOT to be visited by men, for a start."
Hm. I’d normally agree with this sentiment, except for the fact that I know of two exampled that show that this may very well NOT be the case:
Rebecca Watson of Skepchick gave a talk in Cambridge recently, and showed the stats for their blog: even though they’re written by (mostly) women (I think there’s one guy) and have "chick" in the title, the majority of readers are male.
And I’ve written for Inkling Magazine in the past, who say in their about page: "We aim to capture a larger proportion of female readers, but, of course, everyone is always welcome." But you may recognize several of their male contributors as well! It’s a who’s who of the science writing world!
(I hope two links doesn’t set off the spam trap!)
Richard> "I must say, I still find the idea of a female collective somewhat off-putting. It’s crying out NOT to be visited by men, for a start.
Are you talking about a conscious "female collective" or is it something that merely "happened to take place" as in women commenting on blogs by other women? And if it is the latter, which I alluded to in a previous comment, I think it is consistent with another ‘trend’ in society; i.e. the old "movies with men are for men and women" whereas "movies with women/emotional ones are for women only and not men"….
And the first one is the one percived as "for everyone"… since the norm is not the woman.
[As for the example Jenny mentioned on female experts in TV, or the lack thereof, I can’t but remember one example about equality where one said that if you have to pick one representative from a group; most will choose a man. However, if you pick two, often it will be more conscious to pick one man and one woman. This is very obvious when one puts together a group with reps from various groups and every group send on representative…. there is something skewered towards the bias and I guess one can hope that history will prove me wrong. Right now though, not so much]
Austin> You said From my personal perspective as a conference ATTENDER, I don’t care if the speakers are male, female, gay, bi/curious, Martian, whatever. I’m only interested in whether they give an interesting and entertaining talk, preferably one I haven’t heard them give before, and stick to the time limit.
I agree with you when it comes to interesting talks and the gender/what person; it shouldn’t matter. But I am quite sure it does since we are all affected by outside.
There is something to be said about the fact that if you never see a female professor give a talk – do they even exist? Are you insane to aspire to become one? As a role model, or even just a possible aspiration, there is something about seeing and hearing people with whom you can identify. I’m not saying that quota is nessecarliy a good thing, but I think it’s probably a misrepresentaion of the field if there are only male or female speakers.
And of course, there is that whole [feministic] aspect of that some talks that are given at conferences might not be good nor interesting but still they are given – and equality isn’t found until women, as men, can be mediocre without focusing on the gender being mediocre…. it’s just an individual trait.
Agreed, Asa – Jenny said the same thing when I first made the comment. Clearly role models are important, which is one reason why avoiding male-superheavy / male-only speaker lists is a valid concern. So I didn’t mean "people picking speakers should pay absolutely no attention to gender". But – picking a poor (or poorer) speaker because they are a woman would be tokenism, and would be counter-productive, IMO. Like I say, as an audience member, I really only care if the speakers are good value.
Austin: I agree with you. I must ave missed that conversation, I read your comment when you linked it and didn’t follow through on the other comments…
And no, picking a poor woman to have a woman would be foolish. Although, as I stated in my earlier comment, there are quite some men who are picked – dispite being poor – and they are not viewed as being "bad men" but rather "just bad", if that makes sense? The whole argument here is actually that the few women who are picked to be conference speakers can’t afford being even remotely bad, since there is (imho) too many vultures drawing the conclusion "she was bad, therefore women are bad". I don’t care how silly it sounds, I’ve heard it…
Henry, you are missing entire point of this thread. I’m not talking about the proportion of female science bloggers in the general population, and arguing it should be 50:50 (although I very well could do, since I personally have seen no correlation between gender and desire/ability to write well, and the pool of young scientists in many professions is 50:50.).
No, I am talking about the proportion of female bloggers selected to be on high-profile networks. Martin Robbins’ little experiment on the Guardian Science pages yesterday showed that there are indeed a very large number of excellent female science bloggers that have not yet been poached for one of these slots. Of course we can never know whether every single one of them was approached and femininely demured for whatever reasons – weak constitution, too much laundry, "nice girls don’t aspire to high-profile slots", whatever. But I know several well-known, very talented female bloggers with large readerships who have never been approached and who would jump at the chance.
This is the inequity I am talking about.
And for the record, Asa and Austin, I would never dream of advocating choosing inferior women just to make up a quota. What I am asking for is for people to try a little harder to find great women. I am reminded of the first issue of Eureka magazine, and the editor saying they couldn’t find more than 4 women in the world "with astonishing ideas" to profile. After five minutes of googling, perhaps they couldn’t, but honestly, do any of us believe that there aren’t more than four? (Or even more than 40, if you have to ask ten women to get one yes?)
Martin Robbins initially said there weren’t more women on the Guardian blogs because they’d "struggled" to find more. Alom Shaha wrote back, asking Martin to define what he meant by "struggled" – as far as I know there wasn’t a reply to this question. Except that his subseqent actions were a bit of a reply: and now, here we have more than a hundred female bloggers out of the woodwork, after only a few hours of Twitter calls. No, they won’t all be great blogs. But there are definitely some gems in there.
Wasn’t that difficult, really, once he put his mind to consciously thinking about it.
I am, yeah, talking about a conscious female collective. And the presence of just one male contributor says it’s not a female collective. I find the idea not only offensive (it’s sexism) but it smacks of tokenism: because, no matter how untrue it may be, the accusation will be levelled that those people are only there because of their sex: as Asa says, picking a poor woman to have a woman would be foolish.
Jenny, as usual, says it best in her comment at 8.54.
Yeah, I’m also not keen on all-female collectives. As Kate wrote in a tweet, she’d rather play in the big sandbox with the boys.
Amen.
And, you know what? I like having women around.
Steffi – I agree and several other folks above, including myself, have said similar things. It’s very defeatest to explain away low ratios by saying all the good women must be oversubscribed – or that really, they just aren’t as good full stop.
Look what happened to the gender ratios of symphony orchestras when they started holding auditions behind a screen. Hey, look: women actually can play just as well – and have no objections to dealing with the pressure of playing in the big leagues! Fancy that.
What I think we’re going to go forward and do is create a feed aggregate… not a new network, not a new space for ladies only, but a place that aggregates existing feeds of existing female science bloggers, regardless of whether they are independent or on a network. Then, when the usual conversation comes around of who to link to, who to invite to be in a roundtable or conference or new network, and everyone shrugs and says, "I don’t know any female bloggers, and if we try hard to find them, you know, we would only find crappy ones, since whenever you try to find voices from underrepresented groups it always turns out that they are inferior to the white men," they can look at the aggregated posts on scienceblogging.org and realize that there are a lot of quality women science bloggers out there.
See? We’ll do your work for you.
And the comparison of a women-only news site to Marie Claire? Come on. I mean, if you were trying to offend you succeeded, but if you were trying to make a point you failed.
Sounds like a good idea. Where will you host it?
The point being that I wouldn’t pick up a copy of Marie Claire to read, because I don’t think I’m in the target demographic. That’s probably my loss–I’m sure I’ve missed some really interesting articles.
An aggregated feed, however, is a different beast. That sounds like a really useful resource.
David Kroll at CENtral Science (part of the C&EN stable, which is in turn part of the American Chemical Society) has just taken up on this too at http://cenblog.org/terra-sigillata/2010/09/17/women-in-chemistry-blogging-lookin-good-central-science/
Interestingly, he notes 9:4 Female:Male in the C&EN portfolio, but I’ll let you read it all for yourselves…
Thanks for the link, Steve!
Jenny> I never thought you’d argue that [adding poor/mediocre women] either. I thought that was clear?!
I was in that context merely stating the old saying that equality can be viewed as anyone’s right to be deemed mediocre solely as a person, rather than dooming a whole gender/collective….
And I do agree that the "remembering to ask" would be one of the things to try and change since the ignorance isn’t helping anyone.
The point being that I wouldn’t pick up a copy of Marie Claire to read, because I don’t think I’m in the target demographic. That’s probably my loss–I’m sure I’ve missed some really interesting articles.
I, however, do read Good Housekeeping, and have done since I was a lad, picking up the copies assiduously read by my mother – excellent cook, gardener and WI stalwart. It is still a really good read. In recent years, however, it’s become less readable because beauty and fashion (in which I have no interest) have somewhat subverted the cookery and gardening (I suspect that GH is going for a younger readership).
But wait, there’s more.
A few years back they carried a feature from their SCIENCE CORRESPONDENT (yes, you didn’t read that wrong) encouraging the daughters of GH readers to go into science. The article had quite a few short interviews with young women who’d beome scintists, together with some very glamorous shots showing that female scientists are, of course, babes.
I wrote GH a letter praising the article but warning that the career strucrture of scientits was precarious – for everyone, not just women. To their credit, they printed it.
Why don’t my posts ever get 100 comments? Huh? Huh? Answer me that.
Henry, perhaps GH can give me a job if I can’t find any more funding in a year’s time. 😉
Asa, I did understand you but was just making it clear for the record.