A while ago Molly posted a great critique of some recent news articles about the lack of diversity in the top tier of the blogosphere. Thoughts about this have been stewing in the back of my mind ever since and although I’m not sure of the coherence, I do have some things to say.
Firstly, people are not the same. Personally I don’t think that diversity is about making everyone indistinguishable, but rather about celebrating differences. I don’t agree with targets, since I’ve seen what they can do. I don’t think men are the same as women, I don’t think all cultures are interchangeable and I don’t think anyone is better off by people pretending so!
The best illustration I have seen of this is the melting pot vs salad bowl metaphor. During the 80s and 90s, many companies and even countries were actually trying to achieve monoculturalism — taking all different types of people and teaching them to behave in the same way, much as when you take many ingredients and place them in a melting pot, a sort of untextured mush is all that results. The ideal is more like a salad bowl (pluralism) — individual elements are identifiable and can be enjoyed separately as well as in concert with the other flavours.
This is the advantage of true diversity — you get to celebrate and benefit from the differences between people. Got a different viewpoint on how to solve a problem at work? Brilliant! Best way to avoid Groupthink is to make it unlikely that everyone can have the same viewpoint. Haven’t you all worked in teams where each member appears to be just a carbon copy of every other? Isn’t it refreshing when someone new, different, with alternative experience and viewpoints comes in and turns everything upside down?
Back to the problem of the blogosphere. Part of the problem here is the definition of what is seen to be the “good content” of blogs (especially technical blogs) — most of the very popular technical blogs are extremely focused. They are quite narrow in what they encompass, very detailed, even extending to code samples a great deal of the time. They are also almost exclusively written by men.
I have a few theories as to why this is:
- Women tend not to regard themselves as experts as often as men
- Men seem to be more ruthless about regarding blogs as a PR tool and therefore staying on message
- Women don’t sweat the details as much — and don’t enjoy them as much either. Think about how many of the blogs you read focus on actual code, details of solutions or hacks. I have much more of a “I’ll find the info when I need it” approach and I think a lot of other women do too
- The combination of the first & the third points means that even when we do implement something cool or solve a tricky problem, we tend to assume someone else got there first and so don’t document it
- Women multitask. Don’t tell me men do this to the same extent — I love guys and I work well with them, but they can’t juggle anywhere near as well. Because we multitask, we’re more likely to fall into the hybrid blogger category — writing about all the things that interest us
Thus, I think there may be a grain of truth to the white male bloggers produce the best product argument — they do produce the most attractive product for a predominantly white male audience. Women write differently — as do non-Westerners. It’s even pretty evident that there’s a difference in style between white British male bloggers and white American male bloggers. There’s a greater difference evident when the people themselves are more different. So part of the issue is the perception of what is a “good blog” and part is the audience.
But what do we do about most blog readers (at least in the tech world) being white males from English-speaking bits of the world? How can female bloggers be A-list in this kind of environment?
There are three chief strategies:
- Write like men — personally, I don’t think this is a good option. Much like female managers in the 80s & 90s learning a very aggressive, masculine management style, it just perpetuates the myth that you have to conform to a standard to be popular/successful
- Encourage more diversity on the web — this is already starting to happen. It helps when the A-listers are conscious of the fact that they may be gender-skewed, but I don’t think anyone wants them to link to low-quality blogs. Just to perhaps make more effort to expose themselves to a wider variety and still pick out the best of the bunch — as we all should
- Encourage the existing A-list men to write more like women — I hope they won’t mind me saying so, but this has already started to happen. With Eric writing about his daughter, Matt about his childhood and Dan with his BP fascination, great tech bloggers are letting us see about of … well, themselves too, which is definitely moving over towards middle ground. So hopefully soon it will be socially acceptable to talk about everything that we care about, rather than just the tech. That said, if the relentless focus is just one of those differences, hey cool and let’s just allow all the different ways, yeah?
Women tech bloggers do exist — there was a roomful of them at SXSW in the Where Are The Women of Web Design session. But even in person, style differences were evident. It was the only panel I attended where both audience members and panelists were laptop-lite. A number of people came up afterwards to me and introduced themselves. It stood out to me as a very different experience, in a very good way. And the web being the fertile ground for infinite opportunity that it is, I think we can make it the same here.
Comments (7) Permalink
April 23rd, 2005 at 6:38 AM
EXCELLENT post, Meri. Really well done.
I just had a guy post to my site tonight about how he preferred women bloggers because essentially he found men to be too conscious of the importance of a blog post’s relevance and how it would be perceived by other bloggers, whereas he found women far more diverse in their post types and sense of expression.
However, I do think many men are quite natural online and reveal suprisingly intimate things. Eric is a prime example, his blog has always been a mix of personal and technical and it’s one of the things I adore about it. But he’s a rather Exceptional Human just in general, and he’s always been able to express his emotions.
I do agree that seeing the human side of the blogger is what makes following certain bloggers interesting. Yes, the technological and sociological essays are great, but without something of the human in there, it just doesn’t work for me.
Thanks for a great post!
Always,
Molly 🙂
April 24th, 2005 at 7:22 PM
Of course, then there are the inverts.
April 26th, 2005 at 9:15 AM
[…] April 26th, 2005 Diversity Posted by Rachel @ 9:13 am Meri Williams makes some excellent points about diversity and gives some re […]
May 1st, 2005 at 2:45 PM
Joe, what do you mean by inverts?
May 3rd, 2005 at 4:44 PM
Excellent post, and one of the few good ones I’ve seen recognizing that different isn’t evil. As an addition to this though, have you thought about the fact that sometimes you don’t “see” more female tech bloggers, because you aren’t looking at the info to see if its a man or a woman writing? Most of the successful women I’ve see are that way because of a quiet and often understated confidence, not the glaring pink websites and purple websites. You mention this as “writing like men” above, but being confident, knowledgable and able to present a point on a topic doesn’t have to have an assignment of gender to it, unless the topic requires it.
May 3rd, 2005 at 11:12 PM
sQurl, I think that you’re perfectly correctly that the style can be gender-independent and I love the way that you describe it. However, my personal experience is that this is true of individual posts. When I just get a link through to an isolated post on someone’s blog, it is very difficult to tell. However, when you start looking at subscribing to a blog, then you see the broader focus, where the stuff I mentioned about about specificity comes back into play.
May 4th, 2005 at 8:55 PM
I have a very focused weblog—in fact I have three very focused weblogs on very different topics at the moment, and am in the process of launching two more very focused weblogs. I have ideas for five or six others that will probably eventually appear.
I don’t know if this is a male trait, or an introvert trait (perhaps what Joe Clark meant above?) or if I’m on the verge of developing dissociative personality disorder… but this is how my brain wants to work, and it’s hard to think of doing things any other way.
That said, I do like it when a weblog has a bit of personality (not too much) beyond its core topic, and I’m trying to add more of “myself” to my writing. Some of my weblog personalities will find this easier than others, but it’s something to aspire to.
I suppose after I have nine or ten very focused weblogs on different topics, I can create a new one that uses RSS to pull in posts from all of them, and thus simulate the sort of well-rounded personality that you women seem to manage without any effort. 🙂
Anyway, Meri, good post, and it’s great to see some non-reactionary writing on the topic.