Engendering

There's a bit of a dust-up over at Crooked Timber on the subject of female academic bloggers. (Earlier posts here and here.) Allow me to jump up, wave my arms, and announce that I'm female and an academic and a blogger. Hooray! That done, may I point out that, as is the case with most of these discussions, there's no hard evidence for much of anything at all? Presumably, one could ask female academic bloggers why they blog; one could also ask the female academic non-blogging population why they don't.  But isn't putting abstract speculation before data collection sort of like, oh, putting the cart before the horse? (Given that CT's blogroll is self-selecting--you write to 'em, they put you up--it's not possible to use that as an accurate gauge of the women out there.)   

Pseudonyms, whether male or neutral, complicate the gender count further.  In some parts of the world, like Metafilter, I still have a male pseudonym, and I've noticed that the assumption is always that male/gender-neutral "handle"=male poster.  Some people have been startled when I've "outed" myself as (gasp) of the female persuasion.  The argument that men don't post about "domestic things" but women do seems a little...odd, unless PZ Myers or Michael Berube have had unannounced sex changes.  Or myself, for that matter, since bookcases don't quite count as "domestic." 

Comments

[Ancarett]

I don't know why I've held off on asking to be listed on the CT sidebar. Maybe it's because mine is not mainly an academic blog, but a blog by someone who happens to be an academic, a gamer, a parent and a pet-owner and one who might randomly blog about any or none of those topics?

[PZ Myers]

Hey, hey...shhhh. If you keep telling people I mention that domestic stuff, they'll start laughing at me down at the Boys' Club.

[Michael Bérubé]

Yeah, don't be making PZ sound like a girlie-man and messing him up with his boyz. We male academic bloggers have to keep it real, you know-- I know I do, at least until February 15 of next year, when my sex-change operation is scheduled. But what about Charlie Bertsch? He's a male boy, he's an academic, and he's all over the domestic space. No separate spheres out there in Arizona with Charlie.