Sunday, November 04, 2007

I've been doing a better job lately of keeping up with reading blogs than I have done with posting to mine. That's not a bad thing at all.

I've noticed, however, that the majority, by quite a bit, of the education blogs I read are written by men. I read blogs from all levels of education, including colleges and universities. I read blogs written by classroom teachers, resource specialists, and consultants.

I've been weeding out blogs and trying to cut it down to a more reasonable number. It's this process that made me note the gender difference. In other areas, I have more gender balance. I read blogs about parenting, children's literature, and some that are simply for fun. The parenting blogs I read tend slightly more towards women writers, but not by a lot. Those that I read for fun are just about equal. The children's literature blogs are almost all written by women, interestingly enough.

I'm left wondering why this is. Have I just not found the large number of well-written blogs by female educators yet or do they not exist? Is this a gender gap in technology? (The blogs in other categories would suggest this is not true.) Are there lots of female teachers blogging but because they do so in addition to all of their teaching and family duties they aren't promoting their blogs for us to find them easily?

I'm not looking to add a lot more to my blog reading, but I'd love to know about some fantastic women bloggers in the education realm. If you have any thoughts, let me know.

4 comments:

AMY T said...

Well there's this woman over at Elementary, My Dear, Or Far From It. Oh wait. That's you. My entrance into edublogs was from kid lit land so the women domination of kidlit has shaped my edublog lists. I adore the wisdom and insight of Franki and Mary Lee at A Year of Reading.

Wesley Fryer said...

Jenny: This is a very important topic to discuss and I don't have an answer. I'm not sure what the reason is. Here are some of the blogs I read frequently that are written by women:

Cheryl Oakes
http://www.cheryloakes.com/

Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach
http://21stcenturylearning.typepad.com/

Vicki Davis
http://coolcatteacher.blogspot.com/

Jenn Wagner
http://www.technospud.com/blog/

Lucy Gray
http://elemenous.typepad.com/

Ann Davis
http://anne.teachesme.com/

Alice Barr
http://alicebarr.wordpress.com/

If you're not familiar with "Women of Web 2.0" check them out, theirs is a great network (and it's not just for women, I'm a member):
http://www.womenofweb2.com/

Support blogging has a great list of other educational bloggers too, many of whom are women:
http://supportblogging.com/Links+to+School+Bloggers

Hope this helps! :-)

Anonymous said...

I check out Angela's blog on a regular basis - http://musingsfromtheacademy.wordpress.com - because she's both a classroom teacher and a technology specialist.

S said...

I don't know why that is, but it's certainly thought-provoking.

However, I am pleased to see that among parenting bloggers, there's much more of a gender balance than I would have predicted.