Earlier today, I read a post on Jennie Rigg’s Dreamwidth blog about women bloggers. That post itself comes about because of a discussion that began in LDV’s fringe meeting about e-engagement at the Bournemouth conference – and LDV still have an audio recording of that meeting if you’d like to listen. I’m responding to Jennie’s post because she calls out LDV editors on our unconscious (?) misogyny – but I’m responding in a personal capacity, hence these words being here and not over on’t Voice.
I like to think I’m a feminist, and in the Lib Dems, I strongly support the approach we are taking to increase our female representation (ie support, training and encouragement, rather than all-women shortlists. I remember listening to the debate we had at conference, and can keenly remember one woman speaker telling Baroness Williams she was plain wrong – “I want to be woman MP who’s got here on my own strengths, not been elected to parliament as a result of special pleading.”) Even so, I felt a little odd during our fringe meeting to specifically ask for women questioners when almost all of the audience members up to then had been men. Was that a good thing to do or was it tokenism?
Jennie specifically addresses herself to the LDV early morning post, which has two links to Lib Dem blogs. Her thesis is that more of us on the team are men than women, and when we’re selecting our links, we link to more men’s writing than women’s writing. We end up with a self-perpetuating unhelpful spiral that excludes women writers.
I went back and checked the choices I made myself in the posts I’ve written for Davily (eh? fingers. I mean Daily View) since we restarted after the summer break. My reckoning is that my links have been 14 men and 5 women, with one unknown. Unknown to me that is – I don’t know whether Nader Fekri is a man or a woman.
That’s not particularly good, but [fx struggling to find positive gloss] it’s better than the gender balance of the LibDemBlogs list from which we make our selections.
The whole point of DV2x2 was to help spread some of LDV’s awesome power to pull in readers out into the wider Lib Dem blogging community. (NB, if you’ve been linked by DV, do you have any stats on the sort of readership boost it provides?)
But, not to sound like a whiney whinger here, DV is a pain to write. Half the time I don’t know what day of the week it is, and I forget to make my contribution, which means I’m rushing to do it when I’m barely awake or half asleep.
And this is now the third criticism I’ve received for our selections for the second half. Those criticisms are a) you only/disproportionately link to “celebrity” Lib Dem bloggers b) you only link to “essay bloggers” not shorter posts and now c) you don’t link to enough women.
All of which is quite a lot to keep in your head when half awake, and in any case, only have two slots to fill! I will nevertheless endeavour to do so.
One other thing we can do to help: one of our thoughts behind 2×2 was to encourage people to use the comments to link to their own selections of the best writing that they’d like to share with people. I’ve amended our 2×2 template to remind us all to specifically ask for these contributions.
Finally on the issue of keeping a reading list – absolutely. I do use a feed reader (Google Reader) and it’s chock full of people I follow. It also has 2,000 unread posts… I couldn’t comment on the gender balance of the blogs in it, but I’d guess that Jennie is right and I read far more men’s writing than women’s.
Niles's Blog 
2×2 *is* an absolute pain to write. It used to make me horribly stressed. On that basis, if we have to do it (and as it happens I’m not convinced we do), anything that makes it easier is a good thing, which currently means doing it from the aggregator. No reason why 2×2 writers shouldn’t substitute their own reading lists for the aggregator, of course – except that it’s yet more work to assemble a suitably broad list, which then requires manual checking/updating as opposed to the aggregator which has its own turnover.
I’m wondering if a better solution wouldn’t be to commission Jennie to do a weekly round-up of some kind. She’s got a much wider reading list than most of us and her round-ups for Lib Con were always great. *evil plotting*
I think I wasn’t clear enough. I would LOVE it if you would use your own reading list rather than Lib Dem Blogs. There is NO POINT in picking stuff out of Lib Dem Blogs; we all know where the aggregator is. Pick stuff we’re not going to see from Lib Dem blogs.
No, sorry, it’s me not being clear. What I meant to say was that substituting our own reading lists *would* be problematic, because 2×2 takes long enough without sacrificing the one thing that makes it easy, viz the aggregator. I don’t mean it’s impossible, Alex certainly seems happy to do it for example, but I do bridle slightly at the suggestion that the answer to this whole problem is to make existing volunteers work even harder (and this volunteer is currently resting precisely because LDV is so much fucking hassle sometimes). Hence my suggestion that maybe we get you on board to do a big weekly round-up, beyond the scope of the 2×2, instead, because loads of people contributing a little will inevitably be better and more balanced than a few people contributing a lot.
I think I would also dispute your assertion that there’s no point in picking fromn the aggregator. Sure, it may not be particularly helpful to people who already read the whole of the aggregator (which wouldn’t, for example, include me). But then LDV isn’t just supposed to be talking to the “committed” bloggers, who have their own blogs and have everything on a feed reader, or even know what a feed reader is. It’s supposed to be talking to casual passers-by, from within the party and outside, and it’s supposed to be promoting specifically *Lib Dem* blogs to a (slightly) wider world.
But Jennie, if your reading list is only blogs on LibDemBlogs plus a few “celebrity” politics bloggers you are only going to end up listing the celebs.
The point of 2×2, Golden Dozen, LibDig is to point people to good stuff by LibDems that you might have otherwise missed.
Nader is definitely male. Deputy Mayor of Calderdale currently, also the main author of the “Calderdale Amendment” that go the very heated debate during the Faith Schools motion at Harrogate, really have to read his blog more often.
Ryan, these days I rarely check LDB, unless there’s a major party story on I’d rather read my own choice of blogs–I really like that it’s there and appreciate it when I use it, but mostly I prefer not to get into the insular little Lib Dem bubble, which is I think partially causing this discussion.
I had thought that 2*2 was supposed to be posts of interest to Lib Dems, if it’s supposed to be just by Lib Dems then it’s a different problem–we still need to do more to encourage women to submit themselves, and possibly more to just go out and find them (not you, we)–I still remember Alix saying no one would want tor ead her stuff, and Jennie was submitted by me the day after I finally got her to join.
Heh, her doing a weekly roundup for LDV might be good though, although she’d then use it as another excuse to not get out of bed on her day off…
Nader Fekri is male.
Lib Dem blogs is male dominated, but suggest this reflects the Party.
BME contributions are particularly low in numbers
Just to repeat a point I also made on Jennie’s blog – there *is* a point in selecting posts from the aggregator, because that’s what some people like. For them there are too many posts on the aggregator for their time/interest so getting a selection does meet a need.
That’s not mutually exclusive with doing something different to bring a wider range of blogs to people’s attention.
Meral: Do you have any data on the gender balance of the Lib Dems nationally? Genuinely curious about this; I had always been under the impression that the problem was more about getting the plenty of women members that we have to stand as candidates. Certainly I can’t find any information about a terrible imbalance in raw membership, which suggests to me that there isn’t one (though I don’t know). Maybe my local party is doing better on this than most, but having just had a look at our stats (I’m Shrewsbury & Atcham’s data officer) we have a 52% female membership. Is this typical?
Interestingly, I’m only aware of two lib dem bloggers who are members of our local party, and both are men (I’m one of them). This probably isn’t a large enough sample to be statistically significant, though.
“Ryan, these days I rarely check LDB, unless there’s a major party story on I’d rather read my own choice of blogs–I really like that it’s there and appreciate it when I use it, but mostly I prefer not to get into the insular little Lib Dem bubble, which is I think partially causing this discussion.”
This. I look at LDB probably once a month; I have the blogs I read regularly muted on it.
Alix, I didn’t mean to suggest that volunteers should have their work made harder. From my PoV it would be easier to use the blogs I read every day anyway than look at the aggregator I rarely look at.
Mark: “some people like it” doesn’t mean that everyone likes it, but you’re right, nobody should be disenfranchised here. There should be some sort of balance achievable, though.
Meral, Andy, AFAIK we are majority-female membership, but majority-male ACTIVE membership.
Everyone: I have misgivings about the idea of doing anything for Lib Dem Voice; partly for the afore-mentioned party bubble reasons – I already feel like I am too far in, and am losing non-Lib Dem readership, some of whom I consider close friends, and I don’t want to make this worse – but also because of the experience I had working for Liberal Conspiracy. I’m going to be doing a post in the How To Blog series and we’ll see how that goes, but frankly the idea of committing to do something weekly scares the living shite out of me.
“From my PoV it would be easier to use the blogs I read every day anyway than look at the aggregator I rarely look at.”
Ok, but what if it *is* harder for LDV editors to do that? I can only speak for myself, but I don’t have a huge and varied blogroll. It’s just not something I’ve ever had time or inclination to develop, because I know I wouldn’t read it and wouldn’t keep up with it. You’ve got one that you maintain/weed/turnover etc and that’s an asset to your blog, and it’s why your fresh squeezings posts always have really interesting stuff on them.
So the way I see it, LDV could cheekily ask you to lend that asset, and if you don’t want to, then fair enough. But you can’t assume it’s an asset LDV editors also have.
Isn’t this the old question of opt-in versus opt-out?
Each method has their strengths and weaknesses, so using each will avoid detracting from the positives contributions to the current balance. But it’s not a matter of horses for courses, so there’s no reason why it should necessarily be divisive.
As far as giving a more representative sample of blogging viewpoints I don’t see why it is impossible to use all different techniques building on individual preferences and specialisms.
Inclusivity cannot mean substituting one preferred view for another more preferable view, as that just perpetuates a sense of prejudice and disenfranchisement, rather it must mean growing the overall level of participation.
Frankly I love Jennie too, so it’d be great to see her doing what she did on LC for LDV and giving us a more democratic taste of liberal opinion from a different selection of sources. I think it would also give a lot of kudos to the party brand and show we aren’t a navel-gazing sect.
I mean, there are regular scottish and welsh features, why not expand the range by seeking out proper correspondents for the whole range of interests, such as from each of the party bodies… it’d also take spread the burden of running the site!