There has been a fair bit of debate going on in the Irish blog scene that started with Sinéad at Sigla asking the question “Why so few women bloggers?” Now this has sparked something of a heated discussion on feminism in quite a few blogs that is now dying down and I will leave that one be if you don’t mind. However I was reading Carrie’s post on her blog and in writing my comment realised I did have something I wanted to say about the original question…
So where are all those Irish women and why aren’t they blogging?
I think one big reason there aren’t too many women in Ireland that are taking to the web is because there aren’t that many people in Ireland full stop who even know what a blog is. As well as that it has to be said that the men of Ireland are generally spending more time on the computer than the women so would have opportunity to discover this mode of communication and would be the first to leap on it. (I say that as a sweeping generalisation…in my household it’s 50/50 so there are certainly exceptions.) Simply the tech jobs in this country are still, by and large, held by more men and that is where most of the internet usage is concentrated.
Women bloggers are certainly not lacking in the States where the internet is as integral to people’s lifestyles as television. Over there the internet is something people are involved with in their homes, not just something people only have access to if they have a tech job. It’s used by women (and men) to run their businesses, to talk about their interests, to discuss their children, to comment on politics, to get support for their problems and their illnesses, it’s a place where they can meet people with similar interests and chat over the garden fence about subjects serious and banal, it’s where they go to decide which camera to buy and where they post the pictures they take with it. In short it’s in their lives so it’s no wonder they also use it to express themselves.
Ireland is so behind in it’s involvement with the internet as to be laughable. With Eircom’s disgusting monopoly and the way they are sitting on the phone lines and stalling the unbundling of them so they can avoid competition is criminal. At present, here in South County Dublin, within mere spitting distance of our country’s capital city, my broadband choices are ridiculously slim (basically Eircom or some variant thereof). I can’t have wireless broadband so that rules out the packages offered by Magnet.ie and Irish Broadband. As for when they might be available to me…hopefully sometime soon but they really don’t know since it’s all down to Eircom. But at least I do have broadband…my sister lives in County Wicklow, just half an hour’s drive south of me, and Eircom has made vague promises about broadband becoming available to them but not until next year sometime. She would make a great blogger but it’s a moot point when she has to ring me to get me to check her email for her. It’s no surprise most people don’t bother with it when it costs so much for such a bad service.
I would hazard a guess that the majority of those blogging in Ireland are connected in some way to the internet and to technical spheres in general through their jobs. I’m a computer animator who relies on the internet for my work and I spend most of my day sat in front of a monitor. I lived in the UK for five years and that is where I discovered blogging (Heather Armstrong was the first blog I read). Had I stayed in Ireland working as a shop assistant in an art shop I might still be ignorant of it all.
