Affirmative action and playa-hating in the blogosphere? Meryl Yourish is complaining that female bloggers aren't linked to because of sexism. Her analysis [emphasis mine]:

But even though there are more women online than ever before, and even though studies are showing that surfers are increasingly female, it does appear that the majority of "serious" weblogs - the non-journals, non-frivolous political or tech blogs -are still overwhelmingly written by men. Or at least, the ones we link to are. The only exception I can think of is Blogsisters, a weblog written exclusively by women, and which blogroll is exclusively - and deliberately -female. Take a look at the blogrolls on Scripting News or Doc's place, or even Diane E. and Megan McArdle, and you'll find few women-written weblogs. Again, I'm not saying this is deliberate. But it is a striking fact. It's not just the men. Even women have a low female-to-male blogroll ratio. So what's to be done about it? That, too, is a tough one. I believe that bloggers would be better off checking a few of the female pundits on a more regular basis. I try to rectify that bias by sometimes deliberately emphasizing women bloggers in my linkage posts, but I've seen no reason to announce that fact, either. I just make the extra effort every so often. Do I think that Sullivan, Reynolds, Quick, et al owe women bloggers a special look-see? Nope. But I think they'd be better off remembering that there are more than a few women bloggers out there, and they've got a lot of interesting things to say.

Bizarrely, Meryl acknowledges that proportionally speaking there probably aren't many female pundits...yet then proceeds to decry disproportionality anyway! The insinuation is that sexism is what's keeping those heretofore unknown female greats out of the blogrolls. It's not too subtly hinted that some sort of outreach is required to redress this imbalance...because equal opportunity must lead to equal outcomes, after all. More seriously, the charge of sexism is unsupported by the evidence. Let's deal with it anyway:

• There are interesting female bloggers, and their writing talent gets them links and traffic, with nary a reference to their sex. [1]
• If people don't want to be identified as female or male, they need only use a pseudonym or else pretend to be the opposite sex. I would wager real money - to be paid by Paypal - that a statistically significant sample of female bloggers who start anew as "male" bloggers will have traffic levels comparable to their traffic before the switch. [2]

There's more on this throughout the blogosphere, but I thought Dawn Olsen's little burst of petulance was the most amusing. An excerpt [emph. mine]:

Glenn is a prolific linker and can be quite generous about throwing his weight around, and he certainly links to female bloggers. He has even linked to me, but I have noticed a trend in what he links to: it's never any of my more heady posts, but usually something sexual, which taken out context [sic], comes off as condescending or even vaguely insulting.

Of course, context is all important. And visitors to Dawn Olsen's site get quite a bit of context, as they are immediately greeted with a large picture of Dawn Olsen's naked back and denim-clad buttocks, with the caption: "Is My Ass Hot or Not?". But tsk, tsk, Prof. Reynolds - you need to judge a book by its contents, not its half naked cover! And if its contents are filled with "hot wet sex", well, you need to look a bit deeper for the "heady posts"... Anyway, both Dawn's and Meryl's post suggest quite strongly that the underrepresentation of women in blogrolls [3] is a wrong that must be fixed, and that there must be someone (e.g. Prof. Reynolds, Tim Blair, Joe the Institutionally Sexist Web-Surfer) who is doing the wronging. I've already outlined why I think that's not a valid argument, but I do have some advice for people who bag on Reynolds for his success and (supposed) insensitivity: "Don't hate the player - hate the game." [1] Of course, these females are generally more rational/mathematical than the average female, but that's another story. [2] There are technical difficulties here in terms of the overall weblog traffic viewership and the stochastic factors involved in the start up phase of a new blog, but these are not insuperable. We would want to evaluate whether the "male" persona resulted in a substantial boost in traffic from the previous writings of the *same* individual posting as a female. Note that it's not sufficient to ask whether females get as much traffic as males; for one thing, there are fewer female political blogs. For another, *very* few of them are as closely argued as Jane Galt or Capital Influx. [3] Relative to their .5 fraction in the general population, that is. It's not at all established whether females in blogrolls are underrepresented when compared to the fraction of women in the blogosphere . Elizabeth adds: Just to reinforce what Godless says and I agree with : The section of the blogosphere to which she's referring - i.e., the people Glenn Reynolds links - is largely politically-oriented and I just don't think there are as many female political bloggers out there. This logically means fewer blogs to link to and consequently, fewer links. That little microcosm is really a small part of the blogosphere at large and it gets overhyped because of the media coverage, which I'd argue is also the result of topical focus and not gender ratio. If she took inventory of the blogosphere at large, I think she'd find it a lot more proportionate. I don't have data points, but I'd wager that the livejournal community is probably disproportionately female and their blogrolls probably reflect that. Most of my links are male and most of the people that link to me are male, but I don't think that's indicative of sexism on their part and certainly not on mine. My interests happen to be politics, business, and several other topics that more men than women would probably find interesting. Most of the female bloggers I know do journal-style blogs about everyday things - i.e., dating, cooking, etc. Unless the person's a really prolific or funny writer (and some are - see Fish, for example.) I rarely find those interesting and the links on Capital Influx tend to be disproportionately male as a result. It's not a gender-based decision. For the same reason I'm more likely to pick up something by John Arquilla than something by Candace Bushnell at the bookstore, I'm more likely to link a male blogger than a female blogger. I'm more interested in wargames, corporate raiders, and basketball than I am shopping at Barney's, swapping stories about dating, or why Pilates is the next big thing. I'm sure there are men that prefer talking about the latter and women that prefer to talk about the former, but I think they're minorities. If interests coincide I don't think men hesitate to link to female bloggers. (Try to find a major warblogger that *doesn't* link to Megan.) Re: Dawn's complaint - I read Dawn's blog occasionally, and the last few times I've read it, she was talking about sex, stalking Jim Treacher, and pasting IM conversations (about sex) into posts. It was funny, and I enjoyed reading it, but she can hardly complain that Reynolds doesn't take her seriously as a pundit. She rarely posts anything political and/or serious. I have no doubt that she has a serious political side to her identity, but it's definitely not the primary image she has cultivated on her blog. Godless adds: Letter from Gotham has a post up on this, which you may want to read. Partially in response to her, let me outline my view of how sex plays out in the blogosphere. I think there are two primary factors at play:

• More emotional/less rational writing doesn't appeal to males as much, and this style is more prevalent among females.
• Females aren't as aggressive and won't start as many blog wars. Every big blogger gets in pissing matches with other bloggers, and those with the best kung fu (and the most time...) win and get more readers. As an example, look at Instapundit's feud with Alterman this week. He probably has one or two of those a week, and it gets eyeballs.

If sexism is defined as "neglecting otherwise worthy commentary that appeals to the blog audience because the commentator is female", I don't think that's much of a factor. But if we take into account the fact that the blog "market" of readers is male, one could argue that the market neglects female writers because the style/content of female writers is not aggressive/rational enough to satisfy the market. In that sense there is a sort of "2nd order" discrimination based on sex: sex affects content, and readers discriminate on the basis of content. If the content isn't palatable to the mostly male audience, it may be because of the sex of the content generator, but the crucial distinction is that readers are rejecting the content - not the commentator.