BlogHer and the Female Web Entrepreneur
Interesting coverage of the BlogHer 5-year anniversary, where they take a look back at where women in blogging are now.
“Where are the women in tech?” is a huge blog-buzz topic lately. It’s interesting, because you have to wonder what’s so special about technology that it must have 50/50 sexual representation? You don’t see front-page stories asking “Where are the female auto mechanics, construction workers, pest exterminators?” For that matter, where are the male needle-pointers, doll collectors, scrap-bookers, and midwives?
The answer is, they’re all right here. They just don’t always think to call attention to themselves. In fact, studies continue to show that there are more women online than men! Yes, it’s true! But – we’ll carefully edge out on our limb here – they don’t always hang out in the same places.
Go to a World-of-Warcraft forum or the latest geek flamewar on Slashdot, and you’ll usually find men. Women tend to cluster more than men do, because it’s more important to them to keep social connections. Thus, they tend to have a stronger distribution in closer-knit communities – places like Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, Yahoo, and LiveJournal.
It’s kind of like a bunch of guys on a Quake server saying “Where’s the female gamers?” Well, female gamers are playing The Sims; most Sims gamers are female. Also, the Nintendo Wii pulls in 80% of female gamers. Why is this so hard to figure out?
Yes exactly, females like to play more social focused games like the Sims or facebook games like farmville.
Females also tend to buy more online. Just look at the e-commerce statistics.