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.'
