SIVACRACY.NET

The great Echidne of the Snakes post excerpted below can and should be read in its entirety here:

"....The story usually goes like this: Some blogger, a male one, notices that there are very few women bloggers among the top one hundred most popular political blogs (or in some other similar measure). He then points out that the internet doesn't discriminate so the reason for this cannot be in discrimination. In what then? The answer usually consists of some kind of a combination of the following: a) women are not interested in politics, b) women don't like the rough nature of political writing and commenting and c) women are too busy cooking and taking care of children to spend time on the blogs. Sometimes a note is added to the effect that women might be above all such bickering and self-aggrandizing behavior or that women are genetically doomed not to reach for positions which indicate dominance in the human society. And so on.

"The next stage of the lamentations is the chorus of responses. These take several different forms from purely misogynistic shit to arguments that there are plenty of famous women bloggers, only nobody knows about them. I'm kidding here, but truly the chorus does cover the whole octave of possibilities. Somewhere in the refrain the following points are emphasized: that the early adopters have a great advantage on the internet and most of the early adopters were men, that men tend to link to blogs by other men and that the measures we use for gauging popularity are in themselves biased towards older blogs and those that belong to various blogger groups. All of this is true in some ways, as are many of the other theories I have summarized here. But none of them are completely true and many of them are totally untested against actual data. ...."