fling93 loves fishies

Gender Balance

I noticed that my Audioscrobbler chart of my most frequently listened-to musical artists is remarkably gender-balanced. Six of the top twelve are women (Tori Amos, Shawn Colvin, Alanis Morissette, Dar Williams, Aimee Mann, and Sarah McLachlan), as are ten of the top twenty and fourteen of the top thirty. The ratio drops a bit after that to twenty of the top fifty, but still, I thought this was pretty good.

Well, as you might imagine, it was no accident. No, I didn’t carefully make sure I played a female artist every other track (I’m not that anal). But about ten years ago, I read a piece in the Los Angeles Times about the underrepresentation of female artists in the music industry (this was before Lilith Fair), highlighting a few artists worth sampling, like Ani DiFranco and Sleater Kinney. As I realized my own music collection was heavily male-dominated (Rush, Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin), I started looking specifically for female artists. It took a while, but after a few years, I realized my collection was more-or-less even and stopped consciously trying to balance it. This was a few years ago, and I guess it’s stayed pretty even.

Isn’t this a form of Affirmative Action? Sure, but I believe there are situations when you need to consciously fight irrational psychological tendencies, like the tendency to filter and exclude information. Bias is just another one of those things, and I was reminded of this recently in this post by danah boyd on SXSW, where Malcolm Gladwell (author of Blink) appeared:

Take [Malcolm Gladwell’s] key example: orchestras thought that they were judging men and women equally and that women were just not as good. When they started putting up a curtain at the auditions, suddenly, the ratios changed. Drastically. We have biases in every interaction, unconsciously. And in order to level the playing field, we have to actively work to deal with those biases because we have to change the social structure in order to rid ourselves of the biases.

Coincidentally enough, Sleater Kinney played at SXSW (they have the BitTorrent download of all the SXSW music available here). Anyway, while I’ve done a good job countering biases in my music, my blogroll is much less balanced. I noticed this when Kevin Drum talked about the lack of women among the top political blogs (via the ubiquitous uber-commenter, Praktike). This was not the first time this topic has come up, but earlier times I still considered myself new to blogging and my blog reading habits were still very much in flux. But now I don’t seem to change my RSS feed subscriptions very much anymore (and maybe that was just a stupid excuse anyway), so I guess it’s time to see where the blogroll’s at.

Well, only eight of twenty-nine — and this includes group blogs with at least one woman, like Chez Nadezhda and Pub Sociology (both of which I started following because of their male bloggers), as well as four women who are on there because I know them (look at the XFN if you want to know which ones). I’ve never really tried to balance it by gender, being more concerned with balancing it by ideology. I thought that was of prime importance to make sure I’m exposed to ideas across the spectrum, thus actively countering our human tendency to only listen to ideas we agree with.

But I think it’s time I start rectifying this imbalance (update 4/4: indeed, it’s now up to twelve of thirty-three). Just like rock music, it’s impossible to do a blind test to make sure your biases don’t come into play, and an unbalanced result could indicate a bias that you’re not aware of. Even if it isn’t, as I’ve mentioned before, I think the blogosphere generally gives more attention to bloggers that were early or have real-world credentials. This is merely because most bloggers simply have their hands full keeping up with reading their regular blogs that they don’t spend much time exploring newcomers. Indeed, this effect has been noted before, which is why Brad DeLong came up with his plan to Subvert the Dominant Link Hierarchy! And since the earliest bloggers tended to be (geeky) men, and since men have institutionalized advantages in the real-world, this means the blogging pecking-order is tilted against women. So even if you’re not biased, you might be subject to and/or contributing to the blogosphere’s bias.

So I think it’s a no-brainer to try and balance my blogroll better, but I don’t know which ones to add yet. Indeed, I’m in the process of seeking out more female bloggers and seeing which ones I like. Of course, there’s this little problem. One of the sites that caught my attention was Libertarian Girl. Sex-starved and perpetually horny Matt Yglesias linked to a post of hers that complained about the mortgage deduction. As this was also a pet peeve of mine that I’ve been meaning to write about, I went over to comment. She had a cute picture and a lively comments section of libertarians, so I followed the site for a couple of weeks, commenting here and there before deciding that she wasn’t even as libertarian as Yglesias (who’s a bleeding-heart liberal, not a libertarian at all) and giving up on the blog altogether.

Well, I’m glad I did, because it turned out that Libertarian Girl was really a guy using a photo of a Russian mail-order bride — of course, he didn’t take into account that there was a large overlap between libertarian guys and the customer base of Russian mail-order brides. Oops! (Update 4/12: Jonas Luster has a more introspective reaction.) The whole fiasco was a lot like the whole Hot Abercrombie Chick hoax uncovered by Justin Foster and Cameron Marlow, but at least that guy used a lot of candid photos (perhaps of his girlfriend) to make it look more authentic. Of course, the name was a pretty obvious clue, so I never really followed that blog to begin with. But as you can understand, I’m now a bit wary of blogs that overtly take advantage of their gender.

So I’m still looking, and I’d love to hear your suggestions of your favorite female-written blogs (particularly political bloggers and especially conservative or libertarian ones). Keep in mind that I can’t stand partisan hacks like Michelle Malkin or Ann Coulter. And I’d also like to know if any of you ever consciously try to balance your blogrolls for gender or ideology or some other factor, and if you balance your music collection or anything else. Or is it just me, cuz I’m just weird?

Wait, don’t answer that!