The Gendered Blogosphere: Examining Inequality using Network and Feminist Theory

This study examined gender inequity among the most-read political blogs on the Web. Sampling over one year from blog rankings, we found that 10% of the top bloggers were women. Discourse analysis of bloggers' explanations for gender disparity revealed three dominant beliefs: women do not blog about politics, women's blogs lack quality, and top bloggers do not link to women's sites. We use network and feminist theory to explore these claims and offer suggestions for increasing the representation of female voices in the political Blogosphere.