So a few days ago Mike Cernovich at Crime & Federalism addressed the (apparently common) question of why women are underrepresented in the legal blogosphere.
Everyone gets very concerned for women, who apparently are being prevented from blogging. Who is preventing women from blogging? No one says. Well, it’s “men,” we are told.
Mike calls bullshit on that. As evidence, he quotes a recent New York Times article:
About a year ago, the Wikimedia Foundation, the organization that runs Wikipedia, collaborated on a study of Wikipedia’s contributor base and discovered that it was barely 13 percent women; the average age of a contributor was in the mid-20s, according to the study by a joint center of the United Nations University and Maastricht University.
As Mike points out, there are almost no barriers to contributing to Wikipedia. You just click “Edit”. It seems like it would be almost impossible for men to be keeping women out. Yet some people have theories that sound pretty reasonable:
But because of its early contributors Wikipedia shares many characteristics with the hard-driving hacker crowd, says Joseph Reagle, a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard. This includes an ideology that resists any efforts to impose rules or even goals like diversity, as well as a culture that may discourage women.
“It is ironic,” he said, “because I like these things — freedom, openness, egalitarian ideas — but I think to some extent they are compounding and hiding problems you might find in the real world.”
Adopting openness means being “open to very difficult, high-conflict people, even misogynists,” he said, “so you have to have a huge argument about whether there is the problem.”
This doesn’t sound too far off the mark to me–I remember similar theories from the early days of Usenet–but Mike doesn’t care for it much. He has a different theory:
Another theory is that women care less about facts and information than men do. Women instead care about superficial gossip. Consider, for example, the demographics of People:
Female: 66%
…
Walk into any gym in the country – even one in a liberalized, feminist city like San Francisco. You’ll see rows of professional women on the treadmills and stair climbers. I know several of them, and they are doctors, lawyers, psychologists, and other professionals. No patriarchy has kept them from earning fuck loads of money, and obtaining educational credentials. Yet they read stupid shit like People and US Weekly (76% women).
Why should anyone be surprised that a demographic who uses its off-hours to read celebrity gossip aren’t on the Internet sharing useful knowledge, and provoking interesting discussions? Why should anyone blame men?
Over at MyShingle.com, Carolyn Elefant responded that women have a lot of other stuff to do, like housework and taking care of the kids, and lightweight reading like People and Oprah is just a way to relax. Then Mirriam Seddiq at Not Guilty, posted her response which is that Carolyn’s response sounds reasonable, in that she’s too busy living her own life to blog more often, but she has even less time to worry about why women don’t blog more often.
All of this blogging seems like an awful lot of talk that may not lead to any answers about an issue that may not even be a real problem. Naturally, I want a piece of this, and I have my own theory.
It all comes down to an observation made by linguist Deborah Tannen about twenty years ago: As a broad generalization, men tend to use conversation as a form of competition, whereas women tend to use conversation to form and maintain social connections.
Tannen did not try to argue which conversational style was better. Instead, she wanted both sides to recognize that there was a difference, in order to avoid (or at least understand) the miscommunications that could result. For example, a woman might ask a coworker if he wants help learning how to perform a new task, and he might turn down her help even though he could use it because he interpreted her offer as a challenge to his competence. Similarly, a woman who wants a male subordinate to change his ways might soft-sell her criticism in order to be diplomatic, only to have him ignore most of her criticism because he didn’t realize he was being confronted.
It’s important to understand that this is a difference in communication style, which is not necessarily reflective of a difference in psychological outlook. My favorite example concerns a male department head at a company I used to work for who got in an argument with a woman lawyer in another department. Afterwords, while meeting with some male coworkers, he joked that she wasn’t much of a lawyer because she broke down in tears during the argument. Within a year, he was unceremoniously kicked out of the company, due in no small part to her behind-the-scenes efforts. Just because she didn’t get in his face didn’t mean she wasn’t out to slit his throat.
Similarly, just because men don’t spend a lot of time talking about relationships doesn’t mean they don’t care about them. They just don’t see talking as a requirement for working on a relationship.
This effect even extends to casual conversation. I remember my wife and I were driving home one day and we got to talking about our respective lunchtime conversations with coworkers. She and her women coworkers had talked about their families and their friends and what each of them was doing, who was seeing someone, who was going through a breakup, and how everybody was feeling. That same day, me and the guys had gone to lunch and talked about how best to defend the Earth from meteor strikes.
It’s easy to see how the women were using conversation to form social relationships, but how were us guys using conversation to compete? The basic answer is that we were each showing off the cool things we knew about meteor defense, such as which types of asteroids were the greatest threat, how much warning time we needed, and what was the best propulsion method to deflect an oncoming meteor.
We’ve all heard guys trying to top each other’s stories about sports or arguing over which brand of power tools is better or trading obscure factoids about the Star Wars movies. It’s a conversational style that becomes second-nature: In casual conversation, guys tend to givie mini-lectures to show off what they know.
Think about that a minute. Mini-lectures to show off what we know. Isn’t that a pretty good description of what most bloggers are doing?
No wonder blogging is dominated by men. It’s a medium that is almost perfectly aimed at men’s conversational style. We like showing off the cool things we know. After all, why do you think I’m responding to Mike and Carolyn and Mirriam with a post about a relatively obscure linguist’s 20-year old theories?
Hmm. I’d rather take part in the asteroid discussion than listen to a bunch of mommies talking about their kids.
That’s why I like you, Jennifer. The asteroid defense conversations–my friends and I have had several–were always fascinating.
Like I said, Tannen’s theory is a broad generalization about tendencies. There are always going to be lots of conversations and lots of people who don’t fit the pattern. But if there’s any truth to it, even just statistically, it could explain a lot of the gender gap without having to resort to insults against either sex.
I’m a uniter, not a divider.