Hi Paul, hi all, to add some empirical date to this interesting discussion: As others have pointed out already, women are not underrepresented in the blogosphere per se, but in the blogosphere that is most visible, that is the a-list and/or blogs which might be cited by journalists as "typical blogs". I've done some research on the German blogosphere which has a similar structure of attention/publicity as other blogospheres: There is a relatively small group of blogs that get a lot of visits/links (a-list), and the long tail which goes down to blogs with only a few, if any, readers. In a large-scale quantitative surveys I've conducted in 2005, there were about 45% women and 55% men among active bloggers; a content analysis done by colleagues of mine (who drew a random sample of german-speaking blogs) had even higher figures for female bloggers (about 65%). We recently checked the german a-list by looking at the 180+ blogs which made the "Deutsche Blogcharts" in 2006 (http://www.deutscheblogcharts.de; a top 100 list based on Technorati-Data, i.e. measuring popularity through inbound links). Of those, 61 % are run by individual male bloggers, 13% by individual female bloggers, 23% are group blogs (of which, again, 25 percent are run by a group of men and 71 percent by a mixed-gender group); 3 percent didn't give any information on the gender of the author. So women are highly underrepresented in this highly visible segment of the german blogosphere. We haven't looked in detail into the topics these top-blogs cover, but I'd say that a higher share of men than of women is blogging about topics that might attract more readers (e.g. IT, media, reflections on the state of the blogosphere itself, ...), thus giving these male blogs a higher visibility - and, subsequently, shaping the "public image" of blogs! The discourses about the potentials of blogs as well as banalization discourses both within and outside the blogosphere are implicitly gendered, I'd argue - see also the seminal Herring et al 2004 [http://blog.lib.umn.edu/blogosphere/women_and_children.html]. As a last remark: Interestingly we found in a study of a popular german-speaking blog hoster (www.twoday.net), that centrality WITHIN this particulaer platform blog community correlates with gender: Highly central blogs on the platform are more likely to be run by women, and they tend to be of an "public online-journal style" (rather than focussing on political commentary or filtering). Right now, these findings have only been published in german - but in case you're interested in copies, just send me a private E-Mail. Best, Jan Has anyone on this list come across data or reflections on the apparent under-representation of women in the blogosphere? paul teusner fishers, surfers and casters - http://teusner.org/ bio - http://paulteusner.org/ -- Jan Schmidt Obere Sandstr. 9 96049 Bamberg +49 (951) 500 9014 +49 (177) 520 5199 jan.schmidt@bnv-bamberg.de http://www.bamberg-gewinnt.de/wordpress -- Jan Schmidt Obere Sandstr. 9 96049 Bamberg +49 (951) 500 9014 +49 (177) 520 5199 jan.schmidt@bnv-bamberg.de http://www.bamberg-gewinnt.de/wordpress