# Posted 5:33 PM by Ariel David Adesnik  

WHY DON'T HOT CHICKS BLOG? Demonstrating an admirable concern for diversity, Kieran wants to know why the overwhelming majority of academic bloggers are male, even on enlightened and progressive sites such as Crooked Timber.

Kieran's main explanation revolves around the concept of "homophily", which has nothing to do with gay sex. Rather, homophily refers the general social practice of like associating with like. Kieran aptly points out that the biggest problem with this argument is that there is a pretty good mix of lefty and righty blogs out there, but not much balance between male and female authors. Moreover, there is even a considerable amount of interaction between bloggers on opposite sides of the political spectrum.

Surprisingly, one issue Kieran doesn't raise is whether the gender gap in academic blogging reflects the gender gap in academia as whole. I have no idea what the latests statistics are, but I feel like it is something on the order of 2 or 3 to 1. Working off of that baseline, the gender gap may not be so remarkable.

Another issue Kieran doesn't raise is whether the political opinions of academic bloggers are as "diverse" as those in the rest of the blogosphere. Since Kieran's comments about the gender gap are based on some statistics compiled by his co-blogger Henry Farrell, I imagine it wouldn't be too hard to tell us what the balance of opinion is in terms of liberals versus conservatives.

My guess is that conservatives will be overrepresented (but not dramatically so) because of their tendency to compensate for being in the minority. In theory, women should also become more vocal in order to compensate for their minority status. But for some reason, that is not how they operate.

Why not? The most interesting idea that Kieran throws out there is that women have a general tendency to be less assertive than men when it comes to demanding attention and rewards for their achievement. Kieran cites this book as evidence.

This identification of significant behavior differences between the sexes opens up a whole Pandora's Box of hypotheses about the gender gap that might sound cliche and sexist if a conservative without a Ph.D. in sociology decided to elaborate them.

First and foremost, my sense is that women shy away from the kind of forceful and often scathing debate that takes place in the blogosphere. Even though women have few reservations about saying scurrilous things about one another (or about men), they seem to have a certain aversion to saying such things in public. You might say women simply accept as given the existence of a double standard that labels aggressive men "ambitious" and aggressive women "bitchy".

It is also worth asking what kinds of rewards the blogosphere hands out for success. The two most important ones are praise from your peers and attention from thousands of readers. In both cases, this recognition consists of an attachment of sorts to people you have never met and probably never will meet. If one hypothesizes that women are far more concerned about receiving praise and recognition from those they interact with face to face, then bloggering offers women very little in the way of compensation.

So is there any validity to what I'm saying? Heck if I know. I don't study this kind of stuff. All I have is experience to go on. In high school, in college, and in graduate school, I have always found men to be far more outspoken in the classroom. Even on a one-to-one level, I have found many more women who shy away from political debate. In almost every organization I have been part of, men have been more assertive about taking a leadership role.

I'm not saying that women lack the capacity to speak out and lead or that it's their fault if they don't get ahead because there are no formal barriers standing in their way. I do think that culture matters. And perhaps it matters when it comes to blogging, too.
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