Women and (Outside the Beltway) Politics Online: It’s happening

100 Women Political Bloggers, from Catherine Morgan

And the New York Times column: Are more men engaged in politics online than women, and if so, why? Many said yes, guessing that perhaps twice as many men as women, maybe even three times as many men are involved, at least on the traditional politics-oriented sites.
DC Metro Moms: “The Parental Goes Political”

Women bloggers, at least the bloggers I know, don’t tend to blog exclusively about politics. We write about the environment, education, health care, our families, our jobs, our lives and politics. However, we aren’t always looking for the next sound bite from a politician or dissecting the latest poll figures. We write about what concerns us in a way that concerns us, and resonates with our readers….

Today, we’re all going to have an organized discussion about a pivotal political issue in the next election: health care. If we can get a dialogue going, we’d like to do this on a regular basis and tackle many issues that are important to mothers. Those issues also happen to be political. For us, the parental is political and we’d like to make the mainstream media and our politicians understand that. We planned this several weeks ago, shortly after Hillary Rodham Clinton announced her health care reform plan and while the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP) legislation was pending in Congress. Our organized topical blogging event turned out to be quite timely. In fact, due to the President’s veto of the SCHIP legislation, Moms Rising is organizing rallies across the nation to put pressure on Congress to override the veto.

Zephyr Teachout responding to my post on TechPresident:

I think there may be a few additional dynamics going on here–along with those mentioned.

One is simply path dependency. The first groups of political bloggers, men, developed a network with eachother–all of us are inclined to invite more people like us and imagine more people like us doing what we do, so as it grew, the political blogosphere grew male.

I can imagine another world in which the first political bloggers were female–blogging would have been treated differently, different people would have been invited to early polblog conferences, a different network would have developed. We would have talked of blogging as “soft” perhaps–you know, like nursing–and reporters would look to, quote, and therefore build communities around women blogs.

Also, in this country we tend to associate technology and maleness-see the disproportionate ratio of male software developers in this country compared to S. Korea, e.g., where software is apparently coded more as a “language” than a “technology,” and therefore a female and male profession. And we all know that people are more likely to “see” people who fit their stereotypes, and support them.

Related to this, I’m troubled that a new part of political campaiging seems to be less diverse, in general, than political campaigning generally. What I’ve seen repeatedly is women with the same skill set as men being seen as “implementers” when a man in the same role is a “strategist.”

Adrienne Royer on TechRepublican, “Reaching Women on the Right”:

What does this mean for campaigns? We’ve understood this in the media for a long time. There’s a reason why candidates and their spouses share cookie recipes, tour the country talking about education and fight for the covers of women’s magazines. Female voters respond to these efforts, yet web communication is still one-size-fits-all.