Why Aren’t More Women Involved in Digital Politics?
It is still a matter of some consternation that women don't engage online, especially in politics. Sarah Hayward wants to know why, and to do something about it.
10 Jul 2011, 21:50
Women! Man your keyboards!
It might be woefully inadequate given a little over half the population is women, but Dale & Co, when held up against our elected representatives (and I am one) and particularly political journalism and blogging is actually ground breaking. At 28 per cent the number of women contributors is comparatively very high if we all keep it up and contribute as regularly as our male counterparts.
MPs and 30 per cent of councillors are women, we’re also underrepresented as political journalists, commentators and bloggers. Particularly at a senior level. Since Gaby Hinsliff left the Observer there has been no woman heading the political team at any of our national newspapers, and of the top blogs most of them are by men and run by men.
If you spend any time blogging, tweeting and reading political content online this gender disparity is self evident. But to back it up the Hansard Society last week published a report about the gender divide in digital political communications.
The statistics they uncover really do evidence why I was right to raise with Iain the gender of the contributors he has. While blogging MPs are, as a proportion of parliament as likely to be women as men – revealing nothing more than the horrible gender bias in parliament, further down the food chain women simply don’t engage with the political debate online.
While over 30 per cent of local councillors are women, over 90 per cent of local councillor bloggers are men. The Hansard Society looked specifically at Lib Dem Voice (I’m not picking it out because I’m Labour) and found that 4 in 5 articles were written by men and 9 in 10 comments were left by men.
This all wouldn’t matter so much for politics if there was a more general divide in internet use. But there’s not. Women broadly use the internet as often and for as much time as men. As the media shifts to online with more user generated comment, finding that women don’t participate in this (not so) new way to debate and inform political thinking – across the spectrum of political views – should be worrying.
Research is still relatively scant on why women won’t put themselves and their views so readily as men. I often find myself attacked in the most unpleasant terms on both Twitter and, to a lesser extent my own blog. As I write this, I’m watching equalities minister Lynne Featherstone be similarly pilloried. But this abuse isn’t unique to women so, if it figures at all, it can’t be the sole reason.
What is clear is that if women aren’t involved in the grassroots of politics, including the digital grassroots – then women won’t rise to the top of politics and we’ll always be fighting to catch up in terms of having anything close to equal representation.
I don’t tend to write about the process machinations of politics – preferring to work behind the scenes to do what I can to sort them out instead. The reason I write, and the reason I’m pleased to be able to contribute to Dale & Co is not because I have some sense of self importance or need to have my voice heard. But merely that my voice and my opinion are equally valid.
But as it stands my equally valid view isn’t equally represented. And I want to do what I can do to change that.
Comments (2)
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You're right Sarah that the sheer nastiness of some bloggers probably puts (mostly) women off more than men; we tend to be, again on the whole, less confident.
But the debate overall feels so far here to be missing some sense of context and history; the struggle for equality is hardly a new theme, but people - women included - tend not to take it very seriously until the reality hits them personally, usually in or around their thirties. That's why organisations armed with historical perspective and factual information such as Fawcett, however they may be perceived, are so important.
But I also recall quite recently raising the question of whether we Tweeting women should be thinking more about RTing and otherwise responding to others' tweets - and the general response was sadly not very positive. This would be OK for instance if chaps RT'd women's stuff regularly; but somehow I reckon that when it comes to RTs the male majority amplifies itself, at some cost to the female minority. (Research potential here?)
And if you think it's bad for women overall - as it is; surprised you had to mention this to Iain Dale, tho glad he responded! - then I'd guess it's even worse for women of a certain age (I here declare an interest...). And don't even think about working outside London, or possibly the Council, if you're an ordinary political gal and you want your voice heard or your ideas considered.
I've been studying women in science and technology for several decades, and there's a lot to learn from that, both in terms of IT and in respect of how it impacts, I think, on politics. Often (not always, of course) putting your head above the parapet in the usual way of things is just too dangerous.
The struggle to get a range of voices into the ether will continue to be very uphill whilst older women are largely ignored, and each new generation of young women therefore has to discover the issues anew. Until men see this as central as well - and legislation is sort-of albeit all too slowly 'helping' them to do this - it will continue to be very hard work.
In the end, the argument needs to boil down, as I think you Sarah may agree, to this simple fact: a single gendered political monoculture, even if across the spectrum of opinion, will fail us all.
The ultimate point about diversity in political (and other) dialogue and decision-making is that almost always it is better in terms of outcome.
So let's all as women keep blogging away, and hope that slowly this will change the climate of debate. To quote (if I may) the strapline of one of my blogs, 'There's more than one way in politics.'
11/07/2011 01:11I might have a look at the report, but it sounds like they may have missed a trick. There have been, over the years, various surveys demonstrating that the majority of bloggers (of all kinds) are actually women. That much is known. And yet we keep being told (and keep repeating) that the "top political bloggers", whatever that means at the time, are men.
Jennie Rigg has some great posts on this (http://miss-s-b.dreamwidth.org/. Is there html on this thing yet?) It seems anecdotally likely that (a) women don't tend to put their blogs forward to aggregators/round-ups and the like and (b) their blogs are less likely to be categorised as "political", both by themselves and others. For instance, I seem to remember the F-Word blog was originally categorised on Wikio as personal, rather than political, and so were other feminist blogs that posted constantly about policy, law, public discourse and so on. Which on the face of it is absurd, but they didn't fit a definition of "political" that at the time basically amounted to "Westminster village" or at best local party politics.
So while there probably is, to some extent, a problem of reluctance to blow trumpets, it's also the case that even really well-intentioned articles bewailing the lack of women at the tops of aggregators and round-ups don't help much! If the men are creating the aggregators and categorising the blogs, then those handy indexes may not be set up to reflect the way many women write about politics. Yet they are handy, so they're what people use to assess the state of the blogosphere.
11/07/2011 19:25