Something Crikey Editor Jonathan Green asked this morning on Twitter got me thinking. He asked:

serious question: why don’t women (proportionally the unbalance is weird) subscribe to crikey?

We see the same things with political blogs in Australia – the ratio of male to female comments here ranges between about 4 to 1 on a good day, through to 10 to 1 depending on the topic.

Pollbludger is similar.

Over at Catallaxy it’s nearly all male, Tallyroom is nearly all male – the only place on the Australian political net where the gender balance seems to be a little more equal is with some threads at Larvatus Prodeo.

So the big question is “Why?”

With your standard IP address not having a gender identification component, it’s impossible to tell if the skewed comment ratio is reflective of the broader readership, or whether females are just more likely to lurk rather than comment? Although, with Crikey having the same imbalance with their subs, it’s probably not the latter.

Something that has surprised me for a while on the gender balance of the Australian political net is the lack of big female political bloggers. We have Kim and Anna over at LP as a group blog, while Tigtog and Lauredhel at Hoyden touch on politics occasionally and do it well – but where are the dedicated Australian political bloggers of the likes of Wonkette or Pandagon that we see in the US?

Let’s do our bit to find them. Know any female political bloggers in Australia? If so, drop a link in comments and we’ll list them here – big or small, old or new – and hopefully give them some exposure. If you’re an Australian female political blogger, don’t be shy – tell us about your blog. I for one would like to see far more female political voices in Australia’s new media.

The place is getting a little too blokey.

UPDATE

Larvatus Prodeo has a related thread going, as has Hoyden. Fuck Politeness has joined the fray, as has Memes of Production. Anti Social Butterfly has also joined the debate in a rather unique way.

UPDATE 2:

Having just experienced a rather large lesson in the art of political definition over at Hoydens, and how different political subcultures and communities give far different political meanings and nuance to words like “politics”, to better explain what I was trying to get at with the original question and title of the post, let me rephrase the last part of the above question in a way that I hope will clarify what I mean to a wider audience that seems to be dropping by.

What I was effectively asking was “Where are the dedicated Australian political bloggers of the likes of Wonkette or Pandagon that we see in the US? Where is the Oz female blogging equivalent of Laura Tingle? Or Lenore Taylor? Or Adele Ferguson?

There are plenty of Oz female bloggers that exist across every other part of the political spectrum, but the absence of that core mainstream political angle in the Australian blogosphere seems to be an almost uniquely Australian experience.

The list of Australian female political bloggers – as they come in, we’ll put them here:

The Kings Tribune

Daiskmeliadorn

Hexpletive

Tellmeyourpolitik

North Coast Voices

Bernice Balconey