Women bloggers and media coverage: any more updated information than this?

This is a great study, but several years old. I would love to see updated statistics along these lines:

The Discursive Construction of Weblogs

“There is thus a relationship between blog type and author demographics. We propose that this relationship sheds light on how weblogs have been discursively constructed—that is, how meanings and values have been assigned to the emergent weblog phenomenon through its invocation in public discourses—and why such constructions favor men. A selective focus on filter-style blogs, and to a lesser extent, k-logs, characterizes mass media reports, scholarship about weblogs, definitions and historical accounts of the weblog phenomenon produced by blog authors (including by women), and patterns of linking and referring within the blogosphere itself, as described below. Since men are more likely to create filter blogs than are women or teens, this selective focus effectively privileges adult male bloggers. In each case, this outcome is mediated by other motivations that are arguably not sexist or ageist in and of themselves, but that reproduce societal sexism and ageism around weblogs as a cultural artifact.

Mass Media Reports
Media reportage about weblogs, even when ostensibly concerned with the phenomenon of blogging in general, tends to focus on adult male weblog authors. To quantify this impression, we conducted an informal content analysis of 16 articles about blogs from mainstream news sources that happened to come across our desks between November 2002 and July 2003. These articles had been collected by or forwarded to the us by colleagues as being of general interest about the weblog phenomenon, before we decided to study gender and age of bloggers, and thus would not be expected to contain any particular gender or age bias. (A list of the articles is included in the Appendix.) The results reveal that:

• more males (88%) are mentioned in the articles than females (12%);
• males are mentioned multiple times in the same article more often than females;
• males are mentioned earlier in the articles than females;
• males are more likely to be mentioned by name than females; and
• all 94 males mentioned are adults, except for one adolescent male blogger.

The preference to mention adult males is consistent across the articles, regardless of their topical focus. The one exception is an article focused on female weblog authors (Guernsey, 2002), published in the New York Times, which mentions 7 females and 6 males, although all of the bloggers named are adults. With the exception of the New York Times article, none of the articles in the sample mentions the gender or age of the blog authors—rather, adult male bloggers are presented as if they are “typical.” While this sample is admittedly small, informal observation suggests that articles such as these were common around the time we conducted our random blog analysis.[7]

Although they constitute a minority (13%) of blogs, as noted above, filters and k-logs receive the majority of media attention in this sample. Two phenomena that figure repeatedly in the 16 articles are political filters that comment on U.S. aggression in Iraq (so-called “warblogs,” e.g., Ostrom, 2003; Webb, 2003; cf. Cavanaugh, 2002), and Dave Winer’s efforts to establish k-logs at Harvard University (e.g., Festa, 2003; Hastings, 2003). It may be that journalists deem filters and k-logs more “newsworthy” in that their content is information in the external world (events, technology developments, etc.; i.e., “hard news”), rather than internal to the blogger (cf. human interest stories and “soft news”; ben-Aaron, 2003).[8] An unintended effect of this practice, however, is to define blogging in terms of the behavior of a minority elite (educated, adult males), while overlooking the reality of the majority of blogs, and in the process, marginalizing the contributions of women and young people—and many men—to the weblog phenomenon.”

Click here for article from:
Susan C. Herring, Inna Kouper, Lois Ann Scheidt, and Elijah L. Wright, Indiana University at Bloomington