Blogging's Glass Ceiling
By KARA JESELLA The New York Times July 27, 2008
SAN FRANCISCO
FOR two days last week, many of the men's bathrooms at the Westin St. Francis Hotel here were turned into women's bathrooms. The stalls on the second floor were lined with note cards featuring nurturing messages like "You are perfect." Nearby, women were being dusted with blush and eye shadow, or having the kinks in their necks massaged.
There was a lactation room, child care, and onesies for sale emblazoned with the words "my mom is blogging this." No doubt they were.
Last weekend, about a thousand bloggers, almost all without the Y chromosome, attended the annual BlogHer conference, which began in
2005 to help female bloggers gain exposure. It has since evolved into a corporate-sponsored Oprah-inflected version of a '60s consciousness-raising group.Blogging has come a long way from its modest beginnings. These days, there is money to be made, fame to be earned and influence to be gained. And though women and men are creating blogs in roughly equal numbers, many women at the conference were becoming very Katie Couric about their belief that they are not taken as seriously as their male counterparts at, say, Daily Kos, a political blog site. Nor, they said, were they making much money, even though corporations seem to be making money from them.
WHILE it is true that only a handful of female bloggers have found money and status online and in traditional media, the BlogHer conference has amassed enough leverage to draw marketers and advertisers to their event.
There is a measure of parity on the Web. According to the Pew Internet and American Life Project, among Internet users, 14 percent of men and 11 percent of women blog.
A study conducted by BlogHer and Compass Partners last year found that 36 million women participate in the blogosphere each week, and
15 million of them have their own blogs. (BlogHer, which was founded by Lisa Stone, Elisa Camahort Page and Jory Des Jardins, has itself grown into a mini empire that includes a Web site that helps publicize women's blogs, and an advertising network to help women generate revenue for the site.)Yet, when Techcult, a technology Web site, recently listed its top
100 Web celebrities, only 11 of them were women. Last year, Forbes.com ran a similar list, naming 3 women on its list of 25....