US: BlogHer conference brings together female bloggers, breaking the glass ceiling
Posted by Sarah Schewe on July 28, 2008 at 9:55 AM
Do women face a glass ceiling in the blogosphere? Organizers and attendees of BlogHer, the three-year-old conference attended by more than a thousand female bloggers, think so.
Last year, a study co-authored by BlogHer and Compass Partners found that 36 million women (about 11 percent of all US women) participate in the blogosphere each week, and 15 million of them have their own blogs.
Yet, when Techcult, a technology Web site, ranked its top 100 Web celebrities, only 11 of them were women. And last year, Forbes.com created a similar list, naming just 3 women on its list of 25.
"It's disheartening and frustrating," said Allison Blass, a BlogHer attendee whose personal blog at www.lemonade-life.com is about living with Type 1 diabetes.
Created in 2005 to help female bloggers gain exposure, this year's San Francisco event "has since evolved into a corporate-sponsored Oprah-inflected version of a '60s consciousness-raising group," reported the New York Times.
"These days, there is money to be made, fame to be earned and influence to be gained," reports NYT. "And though women and men are creating blogs in roughly equal numbers, many women at the conference... belie(ve) that they are not taken as seriously as their male counterparts... Nor, they said, were they making much money, even though corporations seem to be making money from them."
The conference hosted seminars like "How to Take Names and Be Taken Seriously as a Political Blogger," where many women said that their male colleagues and major media groups undercut them, and linked to them less often.
Megan McArdle, who blogs for the Atlantic monthly about economic issues, did no attend the conference, but noted "Women get dismissed in ways that men don't." "(McArdle) 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," reported NYT.
Confronting the issue head on, and encouraging those women fighting the tide, Enkay recently created the first Top 100 Female Bloggers list and NxE created a 50 most influential female bloggers list, earlier this month.
Sources: The New York Times, About.com
Last year, a study co-authored by BlogHer and Compass Partners found that 36 million women (about 11 percent of all US women) participate in the blogosphere each week, and 15 million of them have their own blogs.
Yet, when Techcult, a technology Web site, ranked its top 100 Web celebrities, only 11 of them were women. And last year, Forbes.com created a similar list, naming just 3 women on its list of 25.
"It's disheartening and frustrating," said Allison Blass, a BlogHer attendee whose personal blog at www.lemonade-life.com is about living with Type 1 diabetes.
Created in 2005 to help female bloggers gain exposure, this year's San Francisco event "has since evolved into a corporate-sponsored Oprah-inflected version of a '60s consciousness-raising group," reported the New York Times.
"These days, there is money to be made, fame to be earned and influence to be gained," reports NYT. "And though women and men are creating blogs in roughly equal numbers, many women at the conference... belie(ve) that they are not taken as seriously as their male counterparts... Nor, they said, were they making much money, even though corporations seem to be making money from them."
The conference hosted seminars like "How to Take Names and Be Taken Seriously as a Political Blogger," where many women said that their male colleagues and major media groups undercut them, and linked to them less often.
Megan McArdle, who blogs for the Atlantic monthly about economic issues, did no attend the conference, but noted "Women get dismissed in ways that men don't." "(McArdle) 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," reported NYT.
Confronting the issue head on, and encouraging those women fighting the tide, Enkay recently created the first Top 100 Female Bloggers list and NxE created a 50 most influential female bloggers list, earlier this month.
Sources: The New York Times, About.com
Posted in :
Related Entries
0 TrackBacks
Listed below are links to blogs that reference this entry: US: BlogHer conference brings together female bloggers, breaking the glass ceiling.
TrackBack URL for this entry: http://www.editorsweblog.org/mt/mt-tb.cgi/7272
Leave a comment