blogs for the girls

Actually, the fact that I know I will write more when I'm busier flies in the face of something I read in a newspaper article this week. I can't remember where I saw it, I've looked and looked. But the story's not lost - it's been taken up by Ros Taylor in today's Guardian: Just for the Boys?

According to this mystery article, men blog more than women on every subject, that is except - apparently - things like childbirth and babycare. Men, it seems, have more time! Men are more convinced that the world wants to hear their opinions! And thus they dominate the blogosphere in every (ahem) sphere of activity. They can, according to the article, turn up late for dinner mumbling something about being "busy with their blog" and get away with it. Important stuff. Hard day at the office. According to the article, woe betide any woman who neglects the family nutrition in favour of some silly hobby.

But let's think about this again: what, after all, is a blog - a web-log - but that girly standby, a diary?

Women are time-honoured diarists par excellence. This was regarded as quite respectable even through my newfound era, the practical Victorian, when both bedroom and drawing-room diaries were written by women and girls of all ages.

Okay, this was probably because it wasn't regarded as very important. And of course there were class elements to the trend. But if we think about it, women almost single-handedly - okay, single-genderedly (with a little help from Fielding, Defoe, Smollett, Cervantes... and even now it occurs to me that that list of novelists, with the exception of Defoe, points pointedly towards a completely different novelistic strand than the one Austen, Burney, Edgworth created) developed the modern novel.

Women (with servants and leisure time - there's that word again) were able to write novels, once again, because most men didn't consider them very important. And it doesn't require as much education to write fiction, of course. Novels were a logical extension of diaries, being essentially records of the events of other, made-up, people. And this is now the proclivity of women in the notebook area became, over years, a revolutionary activity.

And now the men have taken them over? Girls, why are we letting them do this? It's ridiculous: by tradition alone, women should certainly be staking a claim to webloggery: the modern working mother deserves, no less than her gradmothers, to write an account of her thoughts and activities that she can put - oh, the things we do! - where everybody can read it.

I'm all in favour of a small wirelessly connected laptop being provided to every working mother who wants one, not out of the household, child benefit or other 'useful' budget (actually, the government should provide them), for use in her kitchen or utility room. If this is realyl what it comes to, you can change the world while you wait for the pasta to come to a boil.

The whole discussion reared its head when the ex-Tory candidate and blogger extraordinaire Iain Dale asked Ann Widdicombe why women don't blog on the subject of politics. Of course, the vast majority of political blogs are by men.

The article quotes Georgina Henry, the editor of Comment is free, as saying that "the dearth of women who blog about politics reflects the 'disproportionately male' world of politics." And 'there is a particular impatience expressed towards female commentators who blog about political subjects that are considered mostly of interest to other women, such as childcare, work-life balance or raunch culture. 'Women who write about the social agenda often get slaughtered," Henry says.

Typical, ain't it?

A similar debate has been raging in the poetry world, to wit: why is it - or, indeed, is it - so male-centric? Why are the editors 'all' (sic) men, why do women not start little magazines, why do women, or the 'wrong' women, poets have collections published (or not), is it because they pander to the egos of the male editors, or is it a plot? People prop up their positions with numbers, qualitative analysis, rants, lists, hunches, intuition, quotes. But no one can really agree on what is happening, much less why it is.

Gender - or, as they used to call it, sexual politics - is creeping away into the woodwork these days. You can't talk about it - that is, you can, but not without an argument. It's interesting that all the people I know who think poetry publishing is a level playing field are men. It's interesting that the person who's asking why women don't blog about politics is a man.

The pay discrepancy (highest in Europe) has been in the news again. It just won't close, damn it! New research shows that, among other things, pay rises go to those who ask for them, and men ask for rises far more than women do. Ms Baroque herself has sat and been told by her erstwhile line manager that no, she was not experiencing sexual discrimination in the office, even though she knew she was (but that is a long story which ranges freely around three cultures). The arguments are heated enough that it's tempting to slink out the back, rather than get burned from either side.

However, some new research from America apparently shows that women do in fact occupy half the blogosphere - a whole demiblogosphere. The worry, apparently, is that while we are blogging, which is a good thing, we may be clogging up half of the world's precious bandwidth with blogs on nail polish and boyfriends... can this really be true? Follow this link for an article exploring this happy news - but watch for the headline: Women hog half of blogs.