Politics, Gender, and Bias

Michelle Malkin notes the search for Ellen Goodman's "intrepid graduate student" in trying to gain a better understanding Goodman's characterization of the blogosphere as a "Boys' Club." It seems that Goodman has data to support her analysis, but isn't willing to share it.

I sometimes consider myself an “intrepid graduate student,” although I do have a day job as well. For fun, I play a game called Blogshares that uses categorized blogs as a trading device. The players in the game vote on the blogs in the database, and it is actively maintained to try to keep things current. Gender categories are based on self-identification by the blogger, and where it isn’t clearly stated we don’t add the blog to a gender category. Blogs with no posts in the last six months are generally eliminated from the database by the players, although that does tend to lag. The database has something on the order of 6,200 categories, which you can find here.

The fun thing about all this is that the data is highly searchable, and this page lets you search for blogs in multiple categories, like Male, Female, Politics, etc. I did a little research this morning after seeing Michelle's item, and came up with some interesting results:

Category	Total Blogs	Male	Female	Delta (Male vs. Female)
All Blogs	6,357,524	37,620	36,171	4.0%
Politics	3,765	1,300	317	310.1%
Conservatism	684	211	65	224.6%
Liberalism	755	227	93	144.1%
Right Wing Politics	398	115	37	210.8%
Feminism	115	5	79	-93.7%
Progressive	541	172	55	212.7%
Democratic Party	39	14	7	100.0%
Republican Party	34	14	3	366.7%
Life	7,386	1,938	3,300	-41.3%
Journal	11,810	3,038	4,633	-34.4%

What conclusions can we draw from this? I’d say that

(1) Men in general are about as likely as women to maintain a blog, give or take 4%

(2) More men than women keep political blogs, by a factor of 3:1, and this is more-or-less true across the political spectrum. The Feminism category, unsurprisingly, breaks the pattern.

(3) More women than men blog about life or keep a journal online, by a significant 30%-40%

Are these differences a symptom of malice, as Ms. Goodman implies? Hardly. It seems pretty clear to me that this is a difference in passion. It takes a lot of work to write a blog and keep it active and interesting. Most women bloggers appear to care more about subjects other than politics, by at least 10:1. Contrast this with men, where ‘Life’ blogs outnumber ‘Politics’ blogs by only 1.5:1.

Unlike Ms. Goodman, I am perfectly willing to share my spreadsheet with the world. You can find it here. It contains not only the table above, but the names of the blogs in each category. I'd love to spend all day doing more research on this, providing link counts, etc., but the day job pays the bills and this doesn't. Let me just leave with this thought: If you visit Michelle's or Wonkette's blog entry in Blogshares and conclude that female bloggers don't get linked, you are either blind, insane, or so completely biased against men that you don't deserve to be heard in polite company.

Yeah, I know I'm a slacker

Bob over at eCache noticed that I pretty much abandoned my regular posting schedule last summer. Work had a large part in that, since I was working on a never-ending proposal effort from mid-June until last week.
Another factor was an online game that has consumed much of my mental bandwidth: BlogShares. (The observant reader will have noticed the graphic in my sidebar). It's a nicely addictive simulated economy, with multiple levels of play available. At the most basic level, a player starts out with an imaginary $500 with which to buy and sell shares of stock, representing blogs rather than companies. With a few tips, you can build that $500 to $100s of thousands in very short order.
The blogs are maintained in an index, which leads to another level of play. Players can vote blogs into industries, related to the subject or demographics of the blog. Smadanek, for example, is currently included in the index for Delanco (NJ), New Jersey Politics, Local Politics, Conservatism, Americas, USA Education Policy, English, Male, Politics, New Jersey, U.S.A. Politics, Navy, Free-Market Economics, Economics, Military, and Military Service. By voting correctly, players earn chips, which serve as a "social currency" within the game, and karma, which allows the player to eventually become a moderator of votes.
When new posts appear on a blog and Blogshares reindexes it (by visiting with a spider), the blog generates ideas. Ideas are treated as commodities, which can be bought, sold, traded, or used to create artefacts. Ideas also change in value each time an industry creates them, with the possibility of going up or down depending on how rare or common they are.
Once you get to this point in the game, it starts to get fun -- artefacts can be used to manipulate (temporarily) the price of a blog or an entire industry, to buy up all of the publicly available shares, or even to do a hostile takeover.
I've given myself something of a challenge with the game, attempting to push myself as far up the rankings as possible without buying a premium membership. It's tough, because non-premium members are limited to 21 transactions in any 24-hour period, while premiums are unlimited. But still, I'm pretty happy with the results - starting at $500 about 18 months ago, my net worth is now about B$ 1.5 trillion, good enough to crack the top 150 players. Still a long way to go, since the top player has gained almost 10 times that much this month alone.
So, if you like a fun game of building and competition, give BlogShares a try. I've only touched on the basics of the game; there are side competitions, games of chance, raffles, auctions and more awaiting you in this nice little world. Contact me in the game, and I'll get you on the path to a good time.