NITLE Census News

08.14.03

Equal Numbers, Different Interests

A recent Jupiter Research article included the claim that "blogging is split evenly among the genders".

We were curious to see if this result would hold for Blog Census data. On August 5, we hand-checked a random sample of 776 out of a pool of 490,000 English-language weblogs. We looked for unambiguous evidence of the blogger's sex (such as photos or gendered pronouns in reported speech), and marked sex as unknown when such evidence was unavailable.

Our results for anglophone bloggers supported the Jupiter data:

39.8% of bloggers in the sample were men, and 36.3% were women. This result fell well within the margin of error of ±3.5% (indicated in the graph by red error bars).

When we looked at the sample blogs in more detail, however, an interesting pattern emerged:

Nearly half of the blogs in our sample (368, or 47%) fell within the category of 'personal diary' - a journal dedicated entirely to recording the events of the blogger's life. Within this group, women outnumbered men by about two to one. (56% to 28% , with a margin of error of ±4.8%).

In other categories, women were greatly outnumbered:

Of the 6.2% of sites in the 'political' category - sites primarily devoted to politics, current events, foreign policy, and various ongoing wars - a bare 4% were written by women.

(Note this result has a larger margin of error: ±14.5%).

This quick look suggests that the overall even split between the sexes masks significant differences in what men and women choose to write about. In future studies, we'll be looking at blog categories in more detail, and seeing if these patterns of interest hold true in other languages.

Margins of error listed here were computed at a 95% confidence interval.

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