Where are the female bloggers?

As a female writing a blog for my travel business, it struck me when I was looking at the comments made on my blog that there were all from males. Now my blog is fairly new, started in October 2006, so it is hardly a statistically significant sample, with comments in the teens rather than thousands. I also thought of the contacts I have made with other travel blog authors and could only think of one female Pam Mandel the travel editor of Blogher.

I think that women are just as interested in travelling as men, therefore I would have expected blog authors and comments to be fairly equally distributed between the genders. In fact I read the results of survey in the Tourism Review Magazine that in mixed sex couples 60% of online travel bookings were made by women.

I decided to do a bit of research. Problogger has made similar observations but on a larger scale than me. In a online poll of 799 site visitors, 72% of respondents were male, 28% female. When they analaysed the gender of the 300 people leaving comments in one month, 90% were male and 10% female.

I can't come up with any good explanation for this as it would appear women feel comfortable enough to make travel bookings online. Do women spend less time on the internet? I have read that successful blog authors spend two hours a day researching and writing posts and at least as much time reading and commenting on other blogs. Perhaps the majority of women don't have this amount of free time or choose to spend their free time in other ways. Maybe equal numbers of males and females read blogs but fewer women are inclined to make comments or vote in online polls.

I am interested in hearing your opinion on this topic.

tags: female, bloggers, blogging, blog, women, travel, hospitality

Posted 03/05/07 by karen | Filed under: E Commerce and E Business

Comments

My favorites girl bloggers are : http://www.ideahatching.com/

; )

Posted by Mathieu - Radar at 03/05/07 00:56:41

Hi Karen,
I am Karin from the German travel & tourism blog Fasten your Seatbelts http://passionpr.typepad.com

I am glad, I am not the only female writer. Regarding your questions: I have read, that there are as many blogs written by women as there are by men. But... women prefer to write about private matters or their hobbies. That might be the explanation.
Am looking forward to reading from you. I Karin from Vienna, Austria

Posted by Karin at 03/06/07 18:18:23

Hi Karen

Interesting observation. I blog on interiors (http://www.thedecoratinghub...) and recently, have started a travel blog as well(http://www.theglobaldesi.com) and at least in the former, there are lots of female bloggers :)

I do not spend a lot of time on the internet though----i just enjoy writing and exploring the possibilties therein.

Regards

Rekha

Posted by Rekha at 03/08/07 09:35:07

Hi!

You are definatelly not alone :) I`m female and I`m blogging about hotel industry (http://ehotel.wordpress.com).

Posted by ehotel at 03/09/07 13:47:36

Funnily enough, the exact opposite struck me the other day with the industry I write in.

I am a male blogger, blogging on luxury travel issues at http://www.aluxurytravelblo... - I find that most luxury bloggers (admittedly, not most travel bloggers) seem to be female rather than male interestingly.

See my post here:
http://www.aluxurytravelblo...

Paul

Posted by Luxury Travel at 03/10/07 04:24:19

Hi Karen, yo're not alone: here http://blog.relactions.com (about travel and more) you can find not ONE, not TWO... well, THREE female bloggers! :-)

Enjoy!

Posted by Relactions at 03/11/07 17:55:33

Great topic, and glad to discover these terrific topics by our female colleagues!

Posted by Chris at 03/15/07 22:56:24

Ahem...girl travel blogger here!

One Girl, Her Backpack and a Passion for Travel
http://jerristephenson.blog...

Posted by Jerri at 04/21/07 14:13:21