Not a great result today:
Today's topics:
And the results for the week just gone (see last week's total):
Ind. = 'Indeterminate'
Although the data is building up nicely, James Ink reminded me yesterday that it's practically useless unless we know what proportion of letter-writers to the Guardian are women and what proportion men. If 70% of them are men, then the kind of distribution illustrated above is absolutely fair and only to be expected - even if the actual readership of the paper is more equally split (57% men, 43% women).
The actual gender split of letter-writers is something I would very much like to know, but I don't plan to ask the Graun and Observer before I've collated a lot of data first about the current distribution of male and female-authored letters on the letters pages. So this blog shouldn't (yet) be seen as a fait accompli, but as a work in progress.
But James raised an additional interesting point, which is that men may simply be generally more inclined to voice their opinions than women. It's eminently possible - I've certainly spent a lot of evenings in the pub with a lot of men who enjoyed voicing their opinions on every subject under the sun, and the more lager that was consumed, the more opinions they appeared to muster.
But on the other hand, there are indications that women are no less disposed to airing their views in public. For a start, there's the fact that around half (46%) of American bloggers are women (full report available here). For another thing, of all the 14 blogs run by the Gawker empire, the one that apparently* attracts the most comments is Jezebel, the gossip and politics site that's almost exclusively frequented by women.
But on the other hand, the women who comment on Jezebel do so mainly because they like being part of a commenting community, where they can interact with other commenters as well as with the site's editors. So perhaps women are more inclined to voice their opinions in a place where they can have a genuine discussion, rather than have their name printed in the paper. Who knows? If you know, or if you have any views or anecdotes or research or good links to share, I would love to hear them.
* I say 'apparently' as the only place I've seen this cited is in Jezebel's April Fool post about selling out to Condé Nast - but it certainly *seems* like the most commented...
UPDATE: I emailed Jezebel to ask if it really is the most commented blog in the Gawker stable, and editor Anna Holmes kindly responded thus:
'Our comment numbers are looked at on a month-by-month basis, and many months we are the most commented, although we compete with brother site Kotaku, which “won” April. So it really depends on what month we’re talking about; I think it’s safe to say that we are one of the top two most commented Gawker blogs.'
4 comments:
From what I've studied (a bit of linguistics, A-level English language and a variety of feminist stuff on communication) in group discussions, men tend to dominate. Deborah Cameron has written an interesting book recently - though the guardian published extracts in the G2 and all the interesting stuff was in there - which said that the differences between how men and women communicate are less than is traditionally thought as the research study a lot of the ideas were based on wasn't so much a research study as an interesting thought the author had... But Cameron says that a lot of the time it's to do with status - men are seen to have higher status than women, all other things being equal, and therefore get to talk more.
Thanks Sarah - I'll go and dig that out. It does seem to be a self-perpetuating myth that men have a higher status and that what they say is therefore more 'important'. This recent post from the Daily Kos that Valerie found has a similar sort of premise.
I'm trying not to make this a feminist thing because I hate the whole perception of feminists as man-hating whingers, and I hate pigeonholing myself as a woman: I don't think it's very productive. But at the same time, these self-reinforcing notions about male superiority do really annoy me, especially when you realise they're manifested in so many places.
Personally I would describe it as feminist because it is examining whether men and women are treated differently because of their gender. But I agree with you that there is some sort of paradox within feminism asking that we don't be treated differently because we are women and then treating women as a homogenous group. Um, it's tricky... I think it's trying to hold a hope for how the world can be alongside the reality of how the world is.
I'm certainly not a man-hating whinger - I describe myself as a feminist because I think feminism is still necessary and I hope I'm likeable enough to maybe change people's perceptions of feminism.
The problem is that the idea of men having higher status is a social construction - it's entirely subjective - which isn't to say it's not real. But it exists because society believes it is true and acts as if it's true. I find it starts to get slightly circular at this point. But you see it in loads of places - men get paid more than women for doing equal work for example, or in the respective value placed on paid work and domestic work. But again this gets caught up in the idea that domestic work is the women's sphere - who labels it like this? If, as a feminist, I argue this, on what basis am I saying that people treat the domestic sphere as feminine?
Or did you just want to talk about newspapers...?
No, I find all this stuff fascinating, although ultimately quite depressing. To think that we've come so far in some ways and yet in many ways, we've come nowhere at all.
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