Women, Blogging and Politics

As you may know, I've been working hard looking for blogs to invite to Opinions Canada, my new blogs aggregator.

In the last two weeks, I have read hundreds of blogs-- a substantial portion of the Canadian political blogosphere.
And I have casually observed that male political bloggers outnumber female political bloggers. I would guess the ratio to be approximately 2:1 or 3:1.

Of course, sometimes, it's not always obvious who is behind the blog. Pseudonyms don't always speak to the person's gender.

However, it seems to me that if the ratio were closer to 1:1 the female presence would be more obvious.

I think this is significant, because it speaks to the effort to get more women active in electoral politics.

Personally, getting women into Parliament isn't my crusade. I'm happy if they make it, and not terribly worried if they don't.

But what I find with this cause is that there is a strong push to get women to run, but the lack of political blogging is one sign that women just aren't interested in politics.

There could be all kinds of objections raised to my conclusion-- I generally stick to Blogger and Wordpress blogs; I stick to the partisan blogrolls and other well-known blogrolls. There could be many women bloggers hidden in an unknown part of the blogosphere, waiting to be discovered.

And on and on.

But I think this conclusion is borne out by my personal experience. There are significantly fewer women bloggers because women just don't like politics in general; they dislike it in greater numbers than men, and with a deeper revulsion.

There are a myriad of reasons for this, all boiling down to nature and nurture. What this tells me, though, is that those who want more female elected officials are starting from the wrong end.

It's all fine and well to want women elected. However, if there is smaller pool of female competitors, and for various reasons, often start out in politics with further behind in men, in political knowledge, in worldly experience (think of all the stay-at-homes moms who haven't networked or those who don't have a lot of "team" experience) and all the while lacking the resources men have, then of course fewer women are going to be elected.

I think that the political system works best when the women are allowed to compete on the same level as men, regardless of where they "start". We don't want to elect less experienced, less competent, less knowledgeable people for the sake of social engineering.

It seems to me that if we want to encourage more political participation, in general (for both men and women), it would be far better to focus on asking why women don't like politics in the first place, and seek to remedy this, rather than trying to impose a rigid system of promoting women who haven't earned their dues. I'm not saying that any elected woman today didn't earn her due, as far as I know. What I am saying is that insisting on a certain number of candidates (or in a PR system, a certain number of female MPs) distorts the meritorcracy.

It's far better for women to be taught the ins and outs of politics, rather than have the political system lower the bar for them.