As a female blogger, I too find that my blogroll is dominated by other female bloggers.

I also find that the book blogs written by females tend to foster more of a community feeling than blogs written by males (apologies for this massive generalisation). I think blogging is more about discussion and information-sharing rather than top-down authority writing, and women are better suited to this. (Especially if you compare book blogs to online book clubs, and most book clubs are predominantly female).

My first question would be what the overall proportion of men to women bloggers might look like on the internet; if such a thing could even be measured. Especially since many of them probably have multiple blogs. However, whereas your blogs might have a large female presence, mine are predominantly male writers; especially on technology/web-related blogs that I read. While they employ numerous staff writers, the majority is, in my experience across multiple such blogs, male.

I guess what I'm saying is echoing your statement that your feed might not be a representative sample of the entire blogoverse; and I think it differs from niche to niche. It's hard to get a proper sampling for such a large environment as "the blogosphere", one where some people read corporate blogs, personal blogs, travel blogs, cooking blogs, technology blogs, et cetera. If you take the internet as a function of demographics, the results will shift by "region" depending on the audience.

That being said, I think that women have far more of a voice on the internet than they do in traditional media. There are probably five billion sources that say this, but I can't be bothered. Gender equality is nice in theory, but I think we all know that while workplaces and corporations have their clauses and quotas, women are downplayed more often than not. By having to go through the hoops and walk the fine balancing act that is ambitious but not too aggressive, intelligent but not threatening to the patriarchal models, women can often be limited in their scope of reach.

But on the internet, such barriers and filters don't exist. It's a direct and personal experience (most of the time) where you say what you want to say without having to really tiptoe around the tulips. The effect of this could be various things. For one, women can blog about what they want, when they want, how they want. And the other side of it is not just the publishing of blogs, but the readership. In my experience, for almost every blog I've had, I've had far greater (known) female readership/blogroll than male.

Is that because men don't read blogs as much, or they don't comment or give feedback as much, or because -more- women read blogs or comment/feedback? I don't know. My personal experience says yes. Chalk it up to greater female empathy/sympathy, connection/community, or any other two-cent sociological theory. If I say that I think a contributing factor might be females who are not actively in the workforce spending greater time online - homemakers, non-full-time workers, stay-at-home moms, etc - is that sexist?

It seems to me, and obviously this is yet another generalization, that men (in my experience) don't put the time and effort into blogging as much as women appear to do. Even when they do, they're not as personal or open as female bloggers tend to be - I include my own blog in this category. Is it because women communicate better? I don't know. It's hard to tell how well people communicate on a platform that includes no body language and no tonality of voice, which I think women are far more keen to pick up on instinctively.

Like you said, I think that female bloggers are more down-to-earth, dealing with the realities and practicalities of life. Male bloggers tend to focus more on not just "bigger picture" ideas, but also detached, utilitarian subjects. I don't quite know where I'm going with this because I've written seven paragraphs to mainly just echo what you wrote in your post. So I'll just stop now.

As for me, my blog's woefully not been updated since July, so I don't think I even have the right to speak. :p

Thank you for this very insightful piece. We need more discussion and debate about gender prejudice and how it operates in the media.

Last week, 'The Age' Melbourne Magazine published a list of 100 most influential Melburnians of 2009. 72 were men, 3 were groups and 22 were women. Not a single women was listed amongst the 'writers' category and women were very poorly represented in every facet of the arts - except fashion.

Your comments about the nature of women's writing and blogging were like fresh rain on a parched landscape.

Great article. Now let's wait for all the competitive, abusive comments from men! (wasn't that one I saw on twitter). Blogging is a fantastic way to bypass the tired and faded establishment path that will soon be relegated to the past.

There's a lot to say in response to this post and the comments it's so far engendered, much of it already said by @Jeff. A first thing that might be said is that male posturing on behalf of women has a long and disreputable history. When I hear Clive James talk about how much he wishes to 'defend' Muslim women I reach for my revolver, or at least my chador. James might not be on that level, but he in, in a now-familiar fashion, conflates a whole host of issues, enabling him to ignore their most salient parts, and avoid any systematic analysis. Maybe he's being 'digressive' or 'feminine' on the advise of his household angels, but it seems to me that 'incoherent' and 'irrelevant' would be more pertinent adjectives.

Is @Kristy Murray surprised that the '100 most influential melbournians' would nearly 3/4 men? That seems generous to women. Unless you've bought the sex and the city gospel, it should be clear to every woman exactly where power resides, and even Bradley mixes this observation into his rather confusing porriage.

Furthermore, everyone, with the de rigeur caveat 'I'm generalising, but...' has said whatever they've felt about blogs, but it seems they read very few of them, or they would know that there is no point in generalising. My feeds would probably lean towards men, but its difficult for me to tell, and absolutely irrelevant to me. Some of the supposedly 'influential' blogs, eg. bookslut, seem to replicate the publishing industry in general - women faciliate, men write.

It cheapens interesting female writers to assume the best they can do is the cookie cutter realism of Drabble, Glass and Trollope. The depression reason for The Slap's wildly disproportionate praise was not Tsolakas' gender, but the fact that an aesthetically interesting writer had falllen for the broadsheet dogma that writers need to tewll us about 'real' life with 'real' stories in a 'realistic' manner. James does women no favours by pretending that retrograde art is the best we can do. Something not covered in the mainstream media, but covered extensively in both male and female authored blogs is the astonishing effloresence of aesthetically radical poetry written by women, particularly in the US (Juliana Spahr, Jennifer Moxley, Ange Mlinko, as well as older writers like Lyn Hejinian, Rosemary Waldrop, and Susan Howe. More than any other literary field, this is where women are justifiably dominant. When Helene Cixous spoke of an ecriture feminine, she didn't mean forth hand realism or a couple of blog posts. She meant Hejinian's My Life or Oxota, Howe's My Emily Dickinson, or Moxley's The Line.

Also, I assert my feminine right to make spelling mistakes. After all, what's regularised spelling but another male imposition?