Where Are All the Women?
2 June 2004, 10:02 AM

I keep seeing this topic come up on various blogs I've stumbled across (still trying to expand my horizons and find good ones to read). The male bloggers ask, "where are all the female bloggers," to which the women keep responding, "Right here, damnit! Right next to you! Turn around. Look in another freakin' direction and you'd SEE us all!"

Women are nearly half the blogosphere, but the men can't see it because they keep looking at other men and gatherings of men wondering why they aren't women.

It's the same problem that I encountered nearly 14 years ago in USENET newsgroups. It used to come up again and again on soc.culture.pakistan. Every once in a while some guy would wonder where all the women were, and extrapolate the absence of women in the public forum to an absence of women on the Internet as a whole. Each and every time some woman would have to emerge to remind the guys that while they were plinking around on the keyboard and bored, many of their female peers were cooking and doing laundry and grocery shopping. The women budgeted their time online, since their time was already so in demand. That meant that they'd prefer to find places online that would be useful to them and where they wouldn't have to spend precious time fending off amorous men or defending themselves in misogynistic discussions. That almost always meant that they'd seek a private online sphere - an all women email listserv for example - and spend the bulk of their online time there.

Everyone who looked at the public face of the Internet saw an absence of women, and concluded that women were a rarity everywhere on the Internet (or that the Internet was a negative environment for women), when in fact, women congregated in private spaces, and easily found each other online, creating nurturing, empowering virtual spaces that were overwhelmingly female. While my male peers were wondering where all the women were, 95% of all my interactions online were with women. The email messages from listservs used to roll in at 1000 or more a day - all from women, from around the world. We talked about current events, history, politics, religion, daily lives and networked for our careers. We taught each other the technical details we needed to know to stay current in the rapidly-changing technology and we recommended each other for jobs.

The Internet was never a space devoid of women for me. And such is the case for me now, in the blogosphere. Though I've only been at this for just about two years now, I was encouraged into blogging by women, helped by women and 95% of what I read - massive amounts of writings ranging from pithy to political, scholarly to mundane - are ALL WOMEN.

Where are the women indeed? Guys, you just need to turn around and LOOK. We're here.

A Better Boycott
2 June 2004, 9:30 AM