Blogging and Sexism: the great question of the last 90 minutes.

Cut on the Bias – whom I disagreed with regarding abortion recently – has posted about a current brew-ha-hah: is the blogosphere sexist? (Cut on the Bias also has a well-written post about breasts, first of a series, which is recommended reading).

The debate was started by this post, by Dawn Olsen at Up Yours, but really took fire after Meryl Yourish weighed in. (Ms. Yourish also has a great "public service" post linking other folk’s comments). Of the comments I’ve so far read, the one that comes closest to my view is this post by Diane E (scroll down or search for the words "Meryl is right" to find it). Here’s a sample, but she says a lot more, so go and read the original.

Sexism doesn’t lie in the fact that there are more male bloggers, and more linked male bloggers, but the fact that there is a huge double standard: whatever certain male bloggers say is accepted and worthy of the blogosphere richochet; whereas if a woman were to say it, it would have been dismissed or ignored. And–when a woman speaks with knowledge on a subject, using logic and evidence, she is ignored.

Example: me and Steven den Beste.

I have to agree; if this were a pure meritocracy, Diane E. would get tons more links than SDB and many other "foreign policy conservative" bloggers, because she’s simply better: better-informed, better logic, better prose. (On the Blogosphere’s smaller left side, the paucity of links to Body and Soul, compared to many less thoughtful and interesting blogs, might be an equivalent case).

A 1997 study of scientific credit, published in the journal Nature (Wenneras and Wold, "Nepotism and Sexism in Peer-Review." Nature, volume 387, May 22 1997, pages 341-343) provides evidence of a mechanism for sexism that’s pretty similar to what Diane’s suggesting.

What the Nature study did was examine productivity (measured in terms of publications in scientific journals, how many times a person was a "lead author" of an article, and how often the articles were cited in scientific journals) and sex. Publication in peer-reviewed scientific journals is often considered to be the most objective and "concrete" sign of accomplishment in the sciences. These factors were then compared to how an actual scientific review panel measured scientific competence when deciding which applicants would receive research grants. Receiving grants like these are essential to the careers of scientific researchers.

The results? Female scientists needed to be at least twice as accomplished as their male counterparts to be given equal credit. For example, women with over 60 "impact points" – the measure the researchers constructed of scientific productivity – received an average score of 2.25 "competence points" from the peer reviewers. In contrast, men with less than 20 impact points also received 2.25 competence points. In fact, only the most accomplished women were ever considered to be more accomplished than men – and even then, they were only seen as more accomplished than the men with the very fewest accomplishments.

Similarly, "audit" and "blind audition" studies have shown that female job applicants, applying for the same position as identically-qualified men, are less likely to be offered a job – especially when applying for higher-status jobs. It’s unlikely many employers would consciously sabotage her own business by hiring an inferior employee; so why the male advantage? One possibility is that, even when viewing two basically identical resumes, some employers tend to "credit" the male applicant’s work higher; so they subjectively choose the employee they see as more accomplished.

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So what’s to be done about it? Not much. It’s a good idea for bloggers to question themselves – if you only have one or two female links in your blogroll, maybe you should see if there’s a female blogger (or a dozen) who merits being included, but isn’t. (Which doesn’t show that you are yourself sexist, by the way, since a huge part of whom we all link is influenced by who the other folks we read have linked to. Mathematically, because the nonsexist bloggers will be influence by links of sexist bloggers, it’s possible for a minority of prejudiced bloggers to have a significant effect on an entire system.)

Beyond "be aware," though, there’s no particular action I’d advocate. After all, no one’s livelihood is dependent on getting more blog hits; nor is blogging a "zero-sum" activity, where one blog must lose for another to gain; given how little "who gets more hits" matters in the world at large, it doesn’t seem that more extreme measures (like affirmative action) could be justified, even if they were possible.. It’s a shame that folks don’t link more to excellent female bloggers like Diane E. and Je’anne D’Arc – and unfair to Diane and Je’anne, who don’t get to be as influential as they merit – but I haven’t the slightest idea, beyond what I’ve already said, how to remedy it..