As I’m sure you know, the WordPress license agreement mandates a monthly blog post about blogging. What could I do?
Responding to Emily Gould’s self-exposé in the Times Magazine, Jemima Kiss on last week’s Tech Weekly podcast suggested that gender differences on blogs are most pronounced in the kinds of blogs men and women tend to keep:
Personality bloggers write about themselves and their experiences and their lives, and topic bloggers write about other stuff—which, a lot of the time, tend to be written by men, but that’s partly because it’s easier for them to slightly isolate them[selves]—putting my pod psychologist hat on—it’s easier for them to [get] distance from the topic. (19:55 to 12:10.)
With all respect to the Tech Weekly team, this sounds like ’90s-style Men are from Blogger, Women are from Livejournal nonsense. Provided that this gendered difference in blogging styles actually exists—and all we have are anecdotes—isn’t the likelier explanation for this divide wrapped up in issues of economics and gender performance?
Putting on my blog psychologist hat, I suspect that I blog about literary critical issues because my understanding of maleness is, to some extent, defined by romantic stories of public academic discourse between men going back to Plato. As a consequence, it seems unlikely that a hiring or tenure committee will penalize me for my blogging, though, even if they do, as a white man with an advanced degree I am likely to be able to find another high-paying job.
I’d like to be able to argue that the great French diarists and lettristes of the 17th and 18th centuries, like the Marquise de Sévigné, model how we understand women’s public writing; however, since I know zilch about how Sévigné shaped modern discourse I’ll stick to the safe claim: the tradition of public debate among Euro-American women is, compared to Plato, fairly recent. Add to this consideration the statistic that the great majority of bloggers who have been Dooced in the last 10 years have been women and it begins to seem clear that the social and financial pressures pushing women away from topic-blogging are more concrete and relevant than any wispy, unsourced psychological argument.
Hmmm. The thing is, I’ve seen many academic blogs written by men that include writing about everyday life and, the thing that marks female bloggers, Pictures Of Cats!!! Heaven forbid an academic female blogger post a cat picture – she can’t possibly be a serious academic.
All kidding and hyperbole aside, I always find it interesting when people try to define the “academic blog” or the “blogger who is an academic.” Didn’t we move past simplistic binaries years ago?
Granted, my own blog leans more toward the personal. Part of that is just because of who I am, but it is also because I don’t like to blog about the specifics of my dissertation when 1) the dissertation isn’t done, and 2) the dissertation material hasn’t been published in some form or other. My project is fairly unique and I don’t want to encourage poachers. I imagine that more established scholars don’t have as much to fear in this regard. But, I do have an official/professional web site that is all academic – more like an online teaching and research portfolio.
Maybe that’s how I deal with the situation. I compartmentalize at one location and have more of a mix at the other. I don’t know if it really has that much to do with gender in my situation. Or maybe it does and I’m just not aware of it. I do think it has more to do with my current lack of power in the academic hierarchy – at least, to some extent.
My thinking about this goes back to Ivan Tribble, sadly. The simplistic binaries of academic v. non-academic blogging seems to bear some relationship to the sorts of binaries that drive academic life itself: since academic work creeps into all the corners of our lives, at least in the humanities, there is always the danger that we will frighten away potential employers by revealing how human we are. The response to this pressure that you describe—compartmentalization—seems to me to be so overwhelmingly common as to be nearly universal.
This gets me wondering, then, what studies there have been into gender differences in work/life compartmentalization: surely some sociologist has compared the number of family photos in office park cubicles…
I know you don’t particularly care of meme-like things, but I just gave you an award over at my place. Enjoy!