Two recent articles from the New York times have grabbed my attention. From Monday, My Son, the Blogger: An M.D. Trades Medicine for Apple Rumors discusses how one blogger has traded his lucrative career in medicine to focus full-time on his equally lucrative hobby blog.
But the prestige is not distributed equally among the genders. Blogging’s Glass Ceiling covers critiques at the annual Blogher conference that women bloggers do not get as much media or corporate attention as their male counterparts. Despite the equalising power of Google, who pays money from ads placed on sites according to traffic and content, female bloggers claim to get less recognition from other sources.
A study conducted by BlogHer and Compass Partners last year found that 36 million women participate in the blogosphere each week, and 15 million of them have their own blogs. (BlogHer, which was founded by Lisa Stone, Elisa Camahort Page and Jory Des Jardins, has itself grown into a mini empire that includes a Web site that helps publicize women’s blogs, and an advertising network to help women generate revenue for the site.)
Yet, when Techcult, a technology Web site, recently listed its top 100 Web celebrities, only 11 of them were women. Last year, Forbes.com ran a similar list, naming 3 women on its list of 25.
Other prominent female bloggers who did not attend the BlogHer conference agreed that there are unique challenges that women in the blogosphere face. “Women get dismissed in ways that men don’t,†said Megan McArdle, an associate editor at The Atlantic Monthly who writes a blog about economic issues. She added that women are taught not to be aggressive and analytical in the way that the political blogosphere demands, and are more likely to receive blog comments on how they look, rather than what they say.
