A while ago, someone commented to me that, in general, blokes tend to do better at anything that requires self-promotion, whereas women do better at collaborative tasks. This seemed to ring true to me at the time, as I’m certainly less confident at blatant self-promotion now than I was in the before time.
Of course, that’s hard to test but there are occasional sources where one might be able to test this. The Total Politics Blog Awards published their Liberal Democrat blog list this morning, based on votes. In comparison, we have the Wikio top Liberal Democrat bloggers list that Mark Pack posts every month which is based on some magic algorithm involving number of links.
Now, this is completely unscientific – covering different timespans and definite confirmation bias in having written this blog post, but it’s interesting none the less.
| Wikio | Total Politics | |
| 1 | Liberal Democrat Voice | Liberal Democrat Voice |
| 2 | Jack of Kent | Caron’s Musings |
| 3 | Caron’s Musings | Liberal England |
| 4 | Liberal England | Andrew Reeves’ Running Blog |
| 5 | Mark Pack | Stephen’s Liberal Journal |
| 6 | Craig Murray | Mark Pack |
| 7 | Mark Thompson | Liberal Vision (=7th) |
| 8 | Liberal Vision | A Scottish Liberal (=7th) |
| 9 | Spiderplant Land | Cllr Fraser Macpherson |
| 10 | Paul Walter | Mark Reckons |
| 11 | Peter Black | Peter Black (=11th) |
| 12 | Lynne Featherstone | The Potter Blogger (=11th) |
| 13 | Miss S B | Jack of Kent |
| 14 | Liberal Bureaucracy | Spider Plant Land |
| 15 | Nick Thornsby | Living on Words Alone |
| M: 9, F: 4 (69% male) | M: 11, F: 2 (85% male) |
Ironically I’m one of those that tends not to self promote for the Total Politics Awards, indeed this year along with a few others I said vote for Andrew Reeves 1.
But I do agree with you that the gender balance in that voting list leaves a lot to be desired.
Hate to be a pedant on a very interesting and thought provoking blog post, but I actually came joint 11th with Peter on Total Politics, not 12th.
And I know this must come across as rather egotistical and self promoting but indulge me – today’s my birthday 🙂
Fixed – sorry for the delay, imposed by lack of decent IT facilities at conference.
(And belated Happy Birthday too!)