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Argh, blocked at work. How was the 65% rate determined? And was TechMeme's 16.5% rate compared to any other sites? If that's all explained in your article, the
by albedoa 16y ago
Argh, blocked at work. How was the 65% rate determined? And was TechMeme's 16.5% rate compared to any other sites?
If that's all explained in your article, then I'll just read it later :)
- jokermatt999 16y agoCopy pasted for convenience. Will delete later if it's distracting. _____ The coverage of the Arrington kerfuffle provides some great examples of a form of structural bias against women that most people overlook. At this point about 65% of the posts I’ve linked to above are by women (31/47, I think). Here’s TechMeme’s summary of the debate: five guys and Shira 16.6% women. In a comment on Gender, race, age and power in online discussions, chapter n back in 2008, I talked about representation issues on Techmeme: the majority of these blogs are generally what Susan C. Herring et. al. refer to in Women and children last: the discursive construction of Weblogs as “filter blogs”, commenting on external events, as opposed to “personal journals” or “knowledge blogs”; TechMeme’s technology is a natural for filter blogs, so it’s unsurprising that this leads to underrepresentation of women and youth. It’s nice to have such a clear example! At the risk of being pedantic,there are a couple of important lessons here: - The “neutral” algorithms of sites like Techmeme, memeorandum, and mediagazer are in practice heavily biased against women, and so present yet another challenge for women in general — and women in technology, politics, and media in particular - If you’re getting a large chunk of your news via Techmeme, you’re getting a very male view of reality
- jdp23 16y agoThanks to jokermatt999 for the cut-and-paste. Yes, later in that thread there's data from Google and Bing -- both in the 45-50% range. EDIT: Also, here's the link to the Susan Herring et. al. paper I mentioned "Women and Children Last: The Discursive Construction of Weblogs" http://blog.lib.umn.edu/blogosphere/women_and_children.html http://blog.lib.umn.edu/blogosphere/women_and_children.html
- shasta 16y agoWait, 65% of the stories you linked to were written by women, while only 45%-50% of stories at large were written by women? Have you tried to examine the roots of your gender bias?
- jdp23 16y agoYou've misunderstood. There were 47 stories. 31 (65%) were by women. TechMeme highlighted 6. 1 was by women, 16%. Google's front page had 4/9 women. (44%) Bing's front page had 5/10. (50%)
- shasta 16y agoSorry, I still don't understand. When you say there were 47 stories, where did you get that list and how do you know it's comprehensive?
- jdp23 16y agoI got the list by watching twitter, following links, googling, binging. It probably isn't comprehensive but is a superset of the other lists.
- khafra 16y agoIf I'm reading joker's summary of your argument correctly, you're saying that techmeme disproportionately covers blogs about tech news instead of blogs people write about their own lives or about generalized, uncontroversial knowledge; which makes it biased against women? The biasing in this case seems almost an epiphenomenon; TC tries to focus on certain views of certain subjects and succeeds; whether those views are disproportionately written by men has little to do with anything.
- jdp23 16y agoYou are not reading it correctly. I'm saying that there were 47 stories on this topic, of which 31 were by women. Techmeme featured 6 stories on this topic, of which only 1 was by women. Whether or not a view was written by a man strongly is strongly correlated with whether or not Techmeme features it.