“I’m a bit surprised that there hasn’t been more discussion of the overwhelmingly male (on the order of 80%) cast of political blog readership. At first glance, one might think of this as an internet issue, related to hardy perennials regarding women and technology in general, but I think it’s a manifestation of the broader fact that women don’t seem very interested in politics. All the political magazines have overwhelmingly male readerships, and surveys consistently show that women are less informed about politics than men, even when you do controls for income and educational attainment. I saw one book which alleged that women are even less likely than men to be able to correctly identify a candidate’s position on abortion, despite the CW that women care about this more than men. Indeed, the research even showed that women do care about this more than men, in that among those who knew where the candidates stood, it was more likely to be a factor in women’s voting decisions.
So I have no idea why that is, and it probably has some deep and mysterious roots out there somewhere. On the other hand, one thing I’ve long thought is that following politics is less the manifestation of high-minded concern for public affairs that we junkies would like to think of it as, and more like sports fandom — a semi-arbitrary decision to follow something and develop an emotional attachment to a team just because it’s fun. Certainly women don’t watch as much sports as men, even though there’s been tremendous growth in women’s participation (which has a pretty different appeal — I wouldn’t care to play tackle football, but it’s fun to watch) in athletics over the past several decades.”
Looking at the comments to Yglesias’ challenge, I think the difference is real and facetious attempts to put it down to a difference in online polltaking miss the boat. In so doing they prevent us from acknowledging the meaningfulness of the observation.
Both the comment about politics being like sport and the comment about the different modes of discourse men and women use are part of the answer (not that there is one answer that explains it all). Psychologically, Carol Gilligan explained several decades ago the developmental roots of fundamental psychological differences between males and females. Although I am being reductionistic, women are embedded in relationship and maintain interpersonal liaison, while men are confrontive and competitive and their relationships more often disjunctive.
The modern political process in the US is relentlessly mean-spirited, amplifying of distinctions between oneself and one’s opponent, and conciliation and concession are seen as weakness. Statistically, this would be abhorrent to more women than men, although the male “sissies” on the Left who are better able to embrace the feminine in themselves share their female compatriots’ disdain more often for the little men (usually white) playing with their toys in Washington with a deluded sense of their own importance. (Months ago, I published a link in my weblog to a piece of software that claimed, by analyzing a prose sample, to tell if the writer was male or female. A large element of what it looked for was the syntax of disjunction vs. the syntax of connectedness. By the way, I was complimented by its opinion that my writing was feminine…)
I suspect that in more mature democracies than that of the US, the disparity between men’s and women’s participation would be lessened, especially in those where (a) political discourse remains civil, and (b) coalition is necessary to govern.
