Why Are There So Few Female Econ Bloggers?
In answering this question, Claudia Sahm omits what I think is the real answer. Econ blogging is low-status.
Let’s say you’re a female professor at a university somewhere. Your entire academic and professional career has revolved around and will continue to revolve around your search for legitimacy in the eyes of others.
So, the next thing you do is go register littlemisseconblogger.wordpress.com…
Look around Ordinary Times, and you will note that this is a volunteer shop. Every last one of us is here either because we are a bot or because we enjoy it and can afford to. I am sure there are many women economists who would like blogging, but most can’t afford to. They can’t afford to let loose opinions that are less than thoroughly worked out. They can’t afford to get caught expressing a retrospectively embarrassing position. They can’t afford to spend time on work that isn’t peer reviewed and thus won’t get them credit.
Home Economist Mary Norris, 1953. Image by Seattle Municipal Archives 
Blogging does have its rewards, but they are primarily internal and come at the expense of those things that may entail greater rewards. Just because your day job is economics doesn’t mean economics blogging will create benefits that carry over to your career. I question whether even Tyler Cowen, the supreme commander of econ bloggers, feels his real-life academic economics career has been helped much by his economics blogging. Still worse off are the majority of bloggers who write into a stiff wind to no effect.
Blogging is time-consuming. It is more likely to detract from your reputation than enhance it. The blogging world has fat tails, and not in a good way. You are more likely to blog something offensive that gets you fired than you are to blog something great that opens up an opportunity that makes as big a positive impact on your career as losing your job would make a negative impact.
I have a friend who designs offshore oil platforms and also enjoys sailing yachts. Sailing functions in his life like econ blogging does for most academic economists. It’s an expensive habit that can only be justified through your enjoyment of it.
Peter North has some good suggestions on how to be popular and relevant blogging and especially in the area of economics, although I doubt any academic with, or desiring tenure, would want to take him up on the idea.Report
Part of me says “so do it pseudonymously!”
Blog and blog and blog some more. Get into arguments. Throw down in comments! Argue against the position you really hold and see how weak it is. Argue against other positions and see how strong they are. Get better at arguing. Get better at seeing holes in your own arguments.
But then I think that that’s probably not particularly rewarding for people who don’t already fit a very particular psychological profile in the first place.Report
The low status thing doesn’t hold up on close examination. There are plenty of female bloggers in general blogs, women’s issues blogs, culture blogs, and company. There have been women like Amanda Marcotte or Alyssa Rosenberg who got their status through the Internet just like Matt Yglias. Male economic bloggers do not loose and might even gain status from blogging.
My guess is that economic blogging isn’t low status but it isn’t a good way for economists of any gender to spread their views. Rather, it helps economists who already have status propagate their beliefs to a larger audience. Female bloggers who do well, do so in areas where you don’t need pre-existing status like many male bloggers. Without the Internet, nobody would know about Ezra Klein or Matt Yglesias either probably. They would be comfortably middle class but not remotely well known.Report
I should have been more explicit. Blogging is low-status from an academic point of view. That’s an world in which the people you cite have no standing.
Here’s Matt Yglesias, for example.Report
This obviously may not apply for non-academics.
For academics, we can look a bit by inspection. When Tyler Cowen started, he was a professor at George Mason University, and now he is…a professor at George Mason University. When Andrew Gelman started, he was a professor at Columbia, and now he is…a professor at Columbia. Dan Dresser is at Tufts, and I can’t point to any academic career progress due to blogging. I doubt James Hanley has benefitted professionally either.
These people certainly now have public profiles where they would otherwise have none, but that isn’t the same thing as helping their academic careers.Report
Here’s Drezner’s CV. It looks like he started blogging in 2002 as an assistant professor at Chicago. He became an associate professor at Tufts in 2006, which doesn’t seem like an unreasonable move in any case. I don’t know the quality of his publications, but I do have a hard time thinking that the Tufts faculty that hired him were thinking “well, his academic qualifications may be a little below our standards, but he’s an A+ blogger!”Report
I recall that Drezner moved to Tufts because he got denied tenure at Chicago. Whether it was due to blogging is up for debate, but if you’re on the fence about starting a blog, it’s certainly not a point in favor for it.Report
Well, let let this excerpt hang out there with emphases added:
and this:
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I guess that blogging can be deemed low status in academia but the academic hierarchy seems unclear. Actual high status seems to mean becoming well known, respected, and powerful outside of academia like Tyler Cowen or Judith Butler.Report
The academic hierarchy is actually pretty clear. If you’re in a given area, you will know who the big names are in that area. A “big name” is someone whose written multiple papers you’ve actually read and you still remember what area they were in. If someone’s an editor of an A-level journal or a former editor, you will probably know that. And really it’s your status as perceived by others in your area that matters.
I know what you mean by wanting to say that someone like Tyler Cowen has “actual high status”, but if that’s the case, then I’m not talking about actual high status. I’m talking about one’s professional status among one’s peers.Report
FWIW, I actually talked about this the other day in regards to history profs:
All of which is to say that if you have a popular history blog, chances are it will at best do nothing for your intra-office cred, and at worst hurt your rep. I suspect it is the same with economics and other academic fields.Report
You could have just said “Victor Davis Hanson”.Report
Status is always status in some field. It’s entirely possible that blogging brings a certain kind of of status in the areas of feminism and pop culture that it does not bring in economics.
The closest female equivalent to Yglesias and Klein is McArdle and she is an outlier in other ways that are perhaps worth paying attention.Report
It’s worth pointing out that none of these people are academic economists.Report
This is why my posts these days consist mostly of whatever appears on the screen when I let my cat lie down on my keyboard.Report
This explains so much!Report
All of these explanations will likely end up with lots of overlap. For instance, Vikram’s status explanation maps very well to Sahm’s #3:
In many ways, the status that comes from blogging comes from doing academic and ideological combat with other bloggers and maybe that just doesn’t appeal to as many women as men.
Here is my overly simplistic and possibly sexist explanation, that likely maps to a whole bunch of other explanations: economics is not a very good discipline for the women who do want to blog to make the kinds of points that they want to make.Report
The status issue reminds me of a conversation I had at Leaguefest. An OTer was telling me that he thought I Can Tolerate Anything Except The Outgroup was one of the finest essays he’d ever read, right up there with the best of Orwell. But he was concerned that it sounded really weird to say that about a blog post.Report
Why are there so few female astronomy bloggers? Who knows?Report