I said at the time that I was testing a theory that I had and that I’d share that theory after the poll ended. Here’s what I was testing…
The Theory
During my first group writing project I noticed that I had a lot of submissions from bloggers that I was not familiar with. I also had the realization as i saw the submission come in that quite a few of them were from females. The reason that this stood out to me a little was that as I thought about the split of males and females who comment on ProBlogger I realized that it was largely guys who seemed to leave comments.
I began to wonder whether guys males felt more comfortable with the whole commenting thing and/or whether females tended to respond better to other forms of blogging activities and invitations (like the group writing project which is a different form of reader interaction). I decided that while the anecdotal evidence seemed to point to this that maybe I should test it.
The Results
So I started by trying to ascertain what the split between mail and females readers were here at ProBlogger. The split of those who responded to the poll were 28% Female and 72% Male.
Then I looked at the percentage split between the genders in the group writing project. This was a little more difficult as it’s not completely obvious what gender all bloggers are. My guesstimation is that 35% of those participating in group writing project were female and 65% were Male (not too dissimilar to reader split).
Lastly I took a random sample of 300 ProBlogger comments from the last month (it took a little longer than I was expecting) to look again at the gender split there. The results of that were that in that 300 comments 10% of comments were left by Females and 90% by Males.
A Conclusion
I won’t make a sweeping statement about all blogs because my ‘research’ was based solely upon ProBlogger readers and I also won’t claim that my ‘study’ is conclusive as there is plenty of room for error – but it does seem that here at ProBlogger that females are under represented in comments and/or males are over represented.
In contrast to this females participated in the first group writing project at a higher level than males did.
Why this is the case I’m not completely sure as I don’t have expertise in gender studies but I do find it very interesting. Perhaps this is isolated to ProBlogger but I’d be interested to hear what others think about it from their own experiences. Perhaps, considering the above ‘findings’ the comment section below is not the best place for such a discussion – but feel free to respond as you feel comfortable with your theories and ideas.
