In his post The gender profile of Wikipedia Joi ito writes

I haven't conducted any scientific analysis or anything, but Wikipedia seems much more gender balanced than the blogging community. I know many people point out that ratio of men at conferences on blogging and ratio of men who have loud blog voices seems to be quite high.

The core mistake in the assumption Joi Ito makes here is in assuming that participation is equivalent to talking about participation. I've seen several statistics and surveys on blogosphere (God, I hate that word) participation which all seem to point to the same conclusion; the number of female bloggers tends to outnumber the number of male bloggers.

For example, according to the LiveJournal statistics page there twice as many females blogging as males in that community. Given that LiveJournal is one of the oldest and largest blogging communities with almost 2 million active blogs (and almost 5 million user accounts) I think this counts for a lot more than claiming that a lot of women aren't seen at geeky conferences like Web 2.0 or Tim O'Reilly's FooCamp.   

One thing I've found interesting is wondering why if there are more female bloggers than male bloggers, lists such as the Technorati Top 100 are dominated by male bloggers. On Friday I attended a talk by Susan Herring which shed some light on the issue entitled Conversations in the blogosphere: An analysis "from the bottom up." where she discussed some research she and her colleagues had undertaken to discover the nature of conversations in the blogosphere. Interesting data points from her presentation include

• Blogs with more outgoing links tend to be more linked to
• Women tend to link less than men (even in women-centric blog circles such as homeschooling the rate of linking is comparatively less than male-centric blog circles like warblogging)
• Linking doesn't tend to be reciprocal
• Small percentage of blogosphere is interlinked.
• 67% - 75% of blogs surveyed don't link outwards to other blogs
• 95% of blogs surveyed have less than 10 inbound links from other blogs

Some of the data points from Susan's presentation gave me some ideas as to why the various lists of popular weblogs always seem to be male dominated.

The methodology and results of Susan's research can be obtained from her paper, Conversations in the blogosphere: An analysis "from the bottom up."