Gender in Blogging: Counting the Men and the Women

Posted in Blogging, Computers & Technology, Education by Elliott Back on July 23rd, 2005.

Continuing my partnership with the great blog directory Blogwise, I analysed generic first name data on 24,846 different blogs. My goal was to determine how many men versus how many women are blogging, and what the most popular blogger names are for each gender are. To do this, I compared the raw data against US Census first names data, which lists 1000 male and female names, ranked by frequency. If there is a tie between these lists for a given name, I choose the one with a frequency twice as much as the other, or else ignore it. This rarely occurs. Then, there are plenty of other first names that are harder to classify. Those fall into the backup lists, which are simply long lists of male / female names I’ve trolled off the internet. Finally, if it can’t match that, it gives up. This brings me to the following “raw numbers” result:

male: 14548
female: 4390
neither: 5908

That’s right. Out of the 18,938 names I could identify, 76.8% of them are male and only 23.2% female:

Way too many men

Both men and women’s name form a typically power law distribution, where the few most popular names account for most of all names. Note that these are log-y graphs:

Men's Names = Power Law

Women's Names = power law too

And finally, the 10 most popular men’s names:

JOHN
DAVID
MICHAEL
CHRIS
MARK
PAUL
MIKE
JAMES
JASON
RICHARD

And the 10 most popular women-blogger’s names:

JENNIFER
LAURA
SARAH
MICHELLE
LISA
ROBIN
MARY
AMY
HEATHER
LINDA

If this makes you feel lonely, women, it should. 50% of america is female. 50% of bloggers of bloggers should be female. I won’t even *start* to hand out blame or speculate why–I’ll leave that for the comments–but it looks like there’s work to be done. For more information about blogging and naming, see What do you call your blog.

This entry was posted on Saturday, July 23rd, 2005 at 2:08 am and is tagged with james jason, power law distribution, lonely women, us census, raw numbers, names john, first names, many men, sarah michelle, raw data, blogger, bloggers, graphs, blogging, heather, men and women, partnership, chris mark. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback.

Viewing 15 Comments

Tyme 3 years ago 1 point
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Your results are deceiving. You only studied approximately 25,000 out of millions of blogs in total, which is skewing your results. Many women do not put their names on their blogs for security reasons. Or they use nicknames, of which the gender would be hard to determine. Many female blogs have no indicator at all. There are also tons of private female blogs that would not be listed in the directory.

Perhaps as BlogWise grows you will revisit this and you will see the results will change. BlogWise is too new to get accurate data.

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http://nottoogeeky.com

Elisa 3 years ago 1 point
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Hey Elliott: Interesting effort.

When first putting together BlogHer we looked at two different studies to try to get a similar data point: Perseus Development Corporation says women bloggers comprise 56 percent of the blogging population. A recent Pew Internet survey says women comprise 43 percent.

Either way, much closer to half than your analysis.

I couldn't begin to compare methodologies. But I tend to think Tyme points out some valid reasons for the skew.

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Elliott Back 3 years ago 1 point
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Tyme, I must give a rejoinder to your speculation that "many women do not put their names on their blogs for security reasons." The data I was given access to was private name information. Blogwise does not actually display the full name of anyone, so there is no incentive to conceal one's true first name. The real issue with this kind of approximation is that Blogwise probably represents a particular sample of bloggers that is different from those in other studies. Blogwise seems to attract hard-core bloggers. If your definition of a blogger excludes things such as xanga, livejournal, myspace, or msn spaces, then these results are probably more reasonable.

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http://elliottback.com

lori 3 years ago 1 point
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I think you'll find there are other blog software packages or communities where the proportion of m/f is significantly different.

Livejournal I know is full of angsty teenage girls and women of differing ages. It is extremely easy to set up a LJ compared to other blog software and perhaps that is another reason why results may be skewed - however it is still interesting research that has been undertaken.

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http://freakychick.net/

Lever 3 years ago 1 point
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Hmm. OK, so this isn't exactly hard data but I think the majority of bloggers I know are female...

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http://www.foreverblueskies.com

April 3 years ago 1 point
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I find that hard to believe, because there are a lot of housewives who blog in the U.S. I'm not sure what the exact numbers are though.

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http://krisandapril.us/

Paul 3 years ago 1 point
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Pretty amazing data.. I thought majjority of bloggers were women but from your data, i guess not.

Thanks,
Paul

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http://www.downloadsupersite.com

Jesse 3 years ago 1 point
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Continuing what Lori said, if you were to do this with, say, Xanga, then you'd have a ton of teen girls whose names are Tiffany, Brittany, and guys whose names are Matt.

On the other hand the average MT user is going to be more tech savvy, and thus they would probably be a bit older...

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Christian Montoya 2 years ago 1 point
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@ April: There might be a lot of housewives in the US who blog, but I would venture to say that almost none of them host their own blog. Remember, we are excluding most of MySpace, Livejournal, Xanga, etc. I know those are blogs like anything else, but these aren't the ones on Blogwise.

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http://www.christianmontoya.com

christine 2 years ago 1 point
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i have to say the same thing as lever because it's true.not one guy that i know personaly blogs.they're too lazyt and get frustrated easily.those stats aren't true.

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http://grapeses.friendpages.com/

Elliot 2 years ago 1 point
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What do you count as "blogging"? Many of the females I know use social networking-type blog services, such as Xanga, LiveJournal, myspace or even deviantart. On the other hand, many guys use more traditional blogging services, like Blogger.com, WordPress, and movable type.

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http://www.intelliot.com/

Elliot.Wu 2 years ago 1 point
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that sounds great...
i happen to konw that PAUL is also a popular name of blog user.

i have ever read a passage, which indicates that the first letter of a name apears before H ,like BIll, Amy,David. they are more likely to be attractive. and easier to success. such as Bill Clinton/Gates. and Bush
haha ....

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Mauricio 2 years ago 1 point
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Hi!
Is your name in the most popular top ten? Here's the top10-list of the names. I added also the address, so that you can check how many children have been given the same name in the same year you were born!

http://eliottback.com/wp/archives/2005/07/23/ge...

elliottback.com@import url( http://elliottback.com/wp/wp-content/themes/gre...
@import url( http://elliottback.com/wp/wp-content/themes/gre... );
Regards, Mauricio

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aziz 2 years ago 1 point
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It is true that most of femaile bloggers don't leave their real first names.I 've read an artcicle which indicates that to not reveal ur name is a psychological matter.

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"Fake Name Girl" 2 years ago 1 point
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I read from the referrer to you (Blog Top Sites Main) that your blog will tell WHY there are more men bloggers than women. Well? ;-)

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