I am not unfamiliar with being in an environment with few women, after all, I was a cop for a number of years, certainly still a bastion of testosterone, and much more so back in the 80′s.
When I took Systems Analysis for computers in college the major was male dominated. But that was also back in the 80′s – literally a generation ago.
I am one of four siblings, three of which are male. My little nuclear family is me, my husband, and my son.
As you can see, I’ve been used to being a part of the female minority for a very long time.
In 2008 I attended the Blog World Expo in Las Vegas and was not surprised to see that males seemed to be in the majority. This past weekend I attended Charleston’s first BarCamp event – yep – you should be able to easily guess the majority gender there as well. I was surprised at the demographics of BarCamp because it was decidedly lopsided.
I am also one of the Google Wave “public beta testers”. There too, it is overwhelmingly males.
With all that in mind you might find it hard to imagine my surprise when I read the MotherJones article
Where Are All the Lady Bloggers?
[excerpted]
Last week, Technorati released its annual State of the Blogosphere report. Given that women rule the world of social networking, I was interested to find out that the opposite is true of the blogosphere. According to the report, 67 percent of bloggers are men—up a little from the year before.[snip] So is there a glass ceiling in the blogosphere? Where are the female bloggers?
I have been blogging since the spring of 2005, mostly at my “serious” blog Pandemic Chronicle. This blog being much younger and dormant most of its life until I made the decision to switch my primary focus here as opposed to there. As one of the few bloggers in Flublogia [the online cyber flu community], I was also the only female for most of that time. As Flublogia grew the number of females grew as well, though still predominately male.
But, back to the question: Where are the women?
The technology is no longer all that “daunting”, in fact, some of it is down right “no brainer”, or in the current vernacular – “dead simple”. Not that I believe women need “dead simple”, but if it’s an intimidation factor about some concept of a steep learning curve, there is no need to fear such.
Have we not done a good enough job communicating the less “techie” tools available to anyone with an internet connection?
The internet will only grow in its importance to our lives, as its usefulness and benefits grow. It would be a shame if we lost yet another generation of women who should be present – with their voices heard.
