Female Bloggers Noticeably Absent From Technorati Survey

by Jen Nedeau

category: Technology

Published November 05, 2009 @ 01:49PM PT

• 8705 Views

Earlier this fall, Technorati published a survey called the "2009 State of the Blogosphere." Some of the findings are interesting such as the idea that "Despite being perceived by some as enemies of the traditional media, bloggers actually carry a journalistic pedigree."

I was trained as a journalist and pursued that passion until I realized that there weren't many jobs left in print reporting. Now I'm a blogger and a new media director. Not surprising that I ended up in the communications field, but what is surprising about this survey are the statistics about gender:

• Two-thirds are male
• 60% are 18-44
• The majority are more affluent and educated than the general population
• 75% have college degrees
• 40% have graduate degrees
• One in three has an annual household income of $75K+
• One in four has an annual household income of $100K+
• Professional and self-employed bloggers are more affluent: nearly half have an annual household income of $75,000 and one third topped the $100,000 level
• More than half are married
• More than half are parents
• Half are employed full time, however ¾ of professional bloggers are employed full time.

At first glance, it appears that the Technorati methodology failed to include enough women respondents. It seems absolutely erroneous that they only found 1/3 of bloggers are female.

Did they somehow miss the vast network of feminist and "mommy" blogs out there? Or the 1000+ attendance at Blogher?

Marian Wang at Mother Jones takes note of the same results and predicts that the lack of diversity (real or perceived) will only hurt the future of journalism and blogging as a whole:

That's a worse gender imbalance than in American newsrooms, which is saying something. (Mother Jones is a rare exception-by my quick calculation, our editorial department is 61 percent female, but that's hardly the case everywhere.) Women represent only 37 percent of American newspaper staffers, according the American Society of News Editors. And if newspapers are doomed and blogs are to take their place, then this can't be good for the supposed diversity of voices we're getting online.

Here's the methodology from Technorati so you can decide for yourself. Do you think Technorati's statistics are wrong about female bloggers?

Penn, Schoen and Berland Associates, conducted an Internet survey from September 4-23, 2009 among 2,828 bloggers nationwide. The margin of error for the survey is +/- 1.84% at the 95% confidence level and larger for subgroups. The following audiences are included throughout this report:

• All: Entire sample of bloggers
• Hobbyists (72%)
• Part-Timers (15%)
• Corporate (4%)
• Self Employed (9%)

Technorati data was collected from Technorati's index. Lijit collected data for the 2009 State of the Blogosphere report was from two primary sources. The first is the 11,000 active Lijit publishers that have the Lijit Search Widget installed on their blog. The second is the network of 2.5M blogs that those 11,000 blogs connect to via their Blogroll and other social network connections tracked by Lijit.

Photo Credit: Velveteen Mind