Girl bloggers rise in numbers, could help narrow tech gender divide

Shannon Montgomery, THE CANADIAN PRESS
Kylie Robertson first began blogging at 13, about the time she felt some complicated new emotions emerging.

By her mid-teens, she was routinely spilling her feelings online, using her Internet journal as her sounding board. Mostly, she vented about whatever was ticking her off at the time.

"I thought that starting something like a blog could help me - I could go back and read what I was feeling at that time, and it would help me to sort things out," she says.

Robertson, now 19, isn't alone. While teens as a whole rule the blogosphere - 28 per cent of Internet-using teenagers blog compared with only eight per cent of adults - girls of all ages dominate, according to a recent survey by the Pew Internet & American Life Project.

The survey suggests about 35 per cent of online teen girls blog, while only 20 per cent of online boys do it. "Virtually all of the growth in teen blogging between 2004 and 2006 is due to the increased activity of girls," the survey reported.

In some ways, it makes sense that blogging would become a more female pursuit, says Saul Carliner, an associate professor of education technology at Montreal's Concordia University. In the business world, blogs abound in female-dominated fields such as communications, marketing and education.

Carliner says blogs are also a good social networking tool and can be used to share emotions.

"I think what we're seeing is a technology that speaks to (teenage girls), and they're responding to it."

Such a trend could also signal a tipping point when it comes to the number of women involved in technology, says Maggie Fox, co-founder of Toronto Girl Geek Dinners, which aims to make technology interesting and accessible, especially to younger women.

"When you look at the kinds of things that the United Nations has recommended in the past in terms of closing the gender gap on technology careers and understanding, it's stuff like using the web to engage and educate and mentor young women on technology use," she says.

"And that's exactly what social media - things like blogs, MySpace, Facebook - are letting women do."

Fox, the CEO of Social Media Group, cautions that there's no easy answer when it comes to figuring out why only about 10 per cent of technology jobs are staffed by women. But she says getting girls involved in the more social aspects of online technology is a good start.

Regardless of gender, blogging can be a great way for teens to build real-world skills, says Cyprien Lomas, a professor who helped organize the Northern Voices blogging conference last month at the University of British Columbia.

"I think it really encourages them to mature, both in terms of their understanding of communication and networking and, in fact, even things like review and critique, which are all incredibly valuable and transferable skills."

Both Fox and Lomas say blogging or other social applications on the Internet can lead to a deeper interest in other technologies.

"You have young women who are entrepreneurs . . . who have recognized that by figuring out how to design beautiful MySpace pages for their friends, they can actually make money - which involves learning coding, how to use HTML," says Fox, pointing to a 16-year-old girl in Detroit who makes $70,000 a month doing these designs.

From what Lomas has seen at the Northern Voices conference, blogging can be a kind of "gateway technology" that opens people to other applications.

"And so what quickly follows along, I think, is podcasting, video, and you start seeing usage of other technologies like tagging, and even data visualization," he says.

Robertson has also become proficient in website design, but she personally doesn't see a direct link to her blogging hobby.

Another Canadian teen blogger, Jessica Hannigan, won an award known as a Bloggie for her online journal. Hannigan, 18, says she started a blog to work on her writing skills and to have a place to go where she could be "upfront and honest."

She says she, too, plans to expand her Internet skills.

"I also want to learn how to code and do website designs - I think it would be a cool way to bring in some extra money," she wrote in an e-mail interview.

Jenny Bullough, who began the Girl Geek Dinners with Fox, says that there's a long way to go in making girls interested in and comfortable with technology-oriented careers.

The Pew study also indicates that boys are more comfortable at creating websites, suggesting that girls are still more involved in "soft-content creation" such as writing and uploading to existing platforms.

"I think it would be doing girls a great disservice to assume that because they're comfortable blogging, they're getting an edge in terms of being better represented in the field of technology development," Bullough wrote in an e-mail.

For Robertson, the urge to blog fizzled out once she hit college, where she's studying applied communications.

"For a long time I blogged because I felt I didn't really have anybody to talk to or connect with," she says. That feeling dissipated as she made new friends away from home and grew more comfortable with herself.

"I guess I felt it was more beneficial to me now to speak to a person rather than trying to rationalize myself."

© The Canadian Press, 2008