Today's tally:
Tim suggested I look at the issues that people are writing about, to see if women's letters are more likely to be published if they're about 'women's issues'. So I've added a new chart. It's lucky I'm so fond of raw data...
Also, yesterday Miss-Cellany sent me this 2006 article from the News & Observer newspaper in Carolina, which looks at the same issue: do newspaper letters pages genuinely reflect 'the voice of the people'?
Two academics studied 1,400 readers' letters published in the News & Observer, and their findings were reported in the paper as follows (my emphasis):
'These letters represent a basic and important form of political participation -- a way for Americans to voice their opinions and affect the political process,' [the professors] write in an academic paper.
But, the professors say, the letters 'do not seem to reflect the opinions of 'regular Americans,' but rather show systematic biases.' The letters pages give more voice to men than women, according to their research, and therefore more attention to what they term men's issues such as defense and government than to women's concerns such as education and civil rights.
Regardless of whether or not you agree with these assessments of what constitute 'men's' and 'women's' issues (surely all the issues listed are of equal importance to men and women?), it'll be interesting to watch how the Guardian and Observer shape up in terms of how much 'opinion-space' they allocate to each gender on different topics.
2 comments:
I once worked for a newspaper near my home town (in southern Germany). Very often (because I was the intern and noone else wanted to do it) I had to walk around with pen, paper and camera and do little opinion polls on the issue of the day.
Very quickly it became clear to me that most women (of any age) did not want to share their opinions, and almost all men were very eager to explain their point of view to me and were clearly looking forward to having it published in the paper.
Especially older men (50-70) would not stop talking. Older women on the other hand had no interest in telling me what they thought.
That still fascinates me. I might write an article entitled: "Old Men Have Opinions On Everything".
So unless people are very different in other countries, I think one part of the explanation could be that women simply do not write as many letters as men.
[sorry, that was rather long.]
Leonie, I fear you may be right. I did think that the fact that there are almost equal numbers of male and female bloggers means that women *are* just as inclined to air their views and opinions publicly, but perhaps I'm wrong. Or perhaps women see blogging as more of a private/personal forum, rather than a public one.
I definitely think you should write an article called 'Old Men Have Opinions About Everything'. I'm sure a lot of old men would have something to say on the matter...
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