Responding to the feminist critique

Trish Wilson — guest blogging at Feministe — is disturbed by my survey of media and blogs:

Dan Drezner linked to the poll that shows which blogs are read by the media. Guess what, again? That’s right. Top ten – no women. “Elite” responses – no women. One woman (Amanda Butler) was thanked for “collecting and collating the data while displaying the utmost discretion.” Women are valued for … their secretarial skills…. This discussion comes up approximately every three months. Rivka at Respectful of Otters just wrote about it. I last wrote about it in March. Nothing changes. A male blogger (this time Matt Yglesias) asks where are the women interested in politics, or asks where are the women bloggers? We see more media articles that completely ignore the contributions of the large number of female bloggers out there. The guys inevitably say “mea culpa,” but go back to business as usual. Rinse and repeat. We are half the population, and we are nearly half of the blogosphere. We do not deserve to be ignored.

I posted a brief comment to her blog about why I hired Amanda (“[S]he was one of the best students in an undergraduate class I had previously taught. She was assigned tasks that any undergraduate RA would have been assigned. Gender was not a factor in the division of labor.”) UPDATE: click here for Butler’s response to Wilson. Here is Wilson’s response:

So the survey is flawed. Your methodology should have taken self-selection into consideration. It’s another survey that takes into account only the people who choose to link to it, thereby losing sight of many worthwhile blogs. Not only that, you’ll end up with a very narrow view of both the definition of political discourse and the nature of the blogosphere. The same small number of top tier bloggers get the usual publicity, and alternate voices with other points of view are lost. Surveys like that one make it seem as if the blogosphere is primarily composed of men, when that is most definitely not the case. Survey’s like that also narrowly define politics, which is much less two dimensional than that handful of topics most frequently discussed on blogs (Bush, Kerry, Abu Ghraib, Iraq, Israel, etc.) Women’s political voices are being ignored again. I simply find it annoying after all this time. After all the repeated waving to the top tier bloggers that we are here, nothing changes. Women bloggers, especially women political bloggers, continue to be ignored by the high rankers of the blogosphere and by the media, and when we don’t make a survey, we are blamed for not linking to it. The problem isn’t with the women bloggers. The problem isn’t with alternative points of view. The problem lies with the survey.

Another female blogger echoes this sentiment:

[I]t’s a Male thing. They hang in packs. They don’t think about women. It’s in their nature to ignore or forget us. In short, what’s new? So I am not surprised.

Another blogger who goes by Pinko Feminist Hellcat concurred: “Men simply don’t see us. And when we talk about anything besides politics, we are ‘journalers’.”

A few thoughts: 1) Hell yes, the survey is flawed. All surveys are flawed. I was quite blunt in outlining the flaws in the post, so I’m not sure where Wilson thinks I’m saying this is the perfect source of data. 2) Disturbingly, the only other time I blogged about gender and blogs in the past was… er… about three months ago. 3) Wilson has a valid point in saying that “the same small number of top tier bloggers get[ting] the usual publicity.” This was one of the core hypotheses underlying the paper Henry Farrell and I are co-authoring — in terms of both links and traffic, blogs display a power law distribution (See Clay Shirky for the data to support this assertion). As a result, the top blogs absorb the lion’s share of attention. The media survey supports this conjecture. This means is that it’s tough for anyone to crack the top tier of blogs — regardless of gender. 4) Wilson seems to think the results are skewed because there is a narrow definition of “political” blogs. Here’s the thing, though — my survey didn’t ask for the respondent’s favorite political blogs — just their favorite ones. Maybe the respondents have an equally narrow definition of politics, but it was not conditioned by the survey question. 5) The feminist critique did make me wonder if there was any significant difference in the female responses in contrast to the overall response. So I went back to the data to see if there was any appreciable difference in response by gender. Here are the top 10 favorite blogs of the women who responded:

1. Instapundit — 10 2. Sullivan — 9 3. NRO’s The Corner — 6 4. Drezner, Romenesko — tied with 3 6. Gawker, How Appealing, Talking Points Memo, LA Observed, Volokh — tied with 2.

There are a few changes — Kaus disappears entirely, and Sullivan falls from first to second – but names on this list look awfully familiar. 6) Finally, Wilson seems to be confusing normative and positive analysis. In her post, she’s simultaneously upset about two facts: a) feminist blogs are being ignored by the mainstream media; b) I posted survey results suggesting that feminist blogs are being ignored by the mainstream media. I can understand her normative disapproval with the first point (though I respectfully disagree with the extent and source of the problem). I’m a bit flummoxed by her reaction to the second point, which is intended to describe the way the world is, not the way it ought to be. Don’t blame the messenger. To be fair, Wilson herself the proprietor of Feministe says elsewhere that “this media, by nature, begs to be written with exaggeration and embellishment,” so maybe I’m exaggerating the feminist state of pique. Then again, she (that is, Feministe’s proprietor) also says elsewhere that, “if you’re conservative, faint of heart, anti-feminist, homophobic, racist, use bad grammar, and/or detest typos, you will not like what i have to say. feel free to leave.” So maybe I’m not exaggerating. UPDATE: Just for the record, my take on the tenor of most of the comments to this post is akin to Ezra: “I’ve never seen a bunch of commentors so totally destroy their argument by embodying that which they’re denying.”