Sexism and the female blogger: What's in a pen name?

BurtWorm

(1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore

Tue Dec-15-09 05:20 PM
Original message

Sexism and the female blogger: What's in a pen name?

Edited on Tue Dec-15-09 05:33 PM by BurtWorm

This post by Ann from Feministing (see below after the link) reminded me of an amazing phenomenon I'd read recently in a book coming out next month called The Hidden Brain, by Shankar Vedantam. A study of post-op transsexuals found that those who became men saw their incomes and social standing significantly increase, while those becoming women saw their incomes and standing plummet. Vedantam interviewed a couple of professors at Stanford (whose names I forget), one who had become male and one who had become a female, who each corroborated the study. The male discovered that suddenly he was able to make himself be heard during committee meetings, something he had had difficulty doing as a female; the female, a biologist or animal ethologist, found her controversial interpretation of certain data causing outright anger among colleagues, whereas as a man, she had garnered respect for her "originality" after publishing a similarly daring paper.

Ann of Feministing notes below that bloggers with recognizably female names tend to get more angry and threatening correspondence than ones with recognizably male names. Speaking for myself, I've gotten into arguments with people with male identities and female identities here on DU, sometimes very heated ones all around. But these have always been public. I can't think of a single time I've been taunted privately for anything I've written here or anywhere else. How about you? Do you get followed off the public forum by people wanting to continue the fight in private with you?

http://www.feministing.com/archives/019320.html

I spend a lot of time talking about the general pale/male/stale-ness of the media (h/t to Tracy and Jessica for that description), and I generally find myself chalking it up to a number of big, interrelated factors: Men are socialized to be more aggressive and confident, which translates to pitching more articles and getting published more often. Men are more likely to be well-connected to other powerful men in the business. Men are more likely to tout their expertise, while women will seemingly do anything to downplay their knowledge and experience. A disproportionate amount of care-giving responsibility forces women to down-shift their time-consuming media jobs. And on and on.

Clearly, I need to be using just one word: sexism. Take it from this woman, who decided to adopt the pen name James Chartrand and began earning double and triple the income she did with her given name. Even I would never have guessed the difference would be so stark.

We all know about the pay gap, sure. But this isn't just about payment levels. For opinion writers, especially those whose work is published online (aka almost all of them), a female byline is a liability when it comes to the amount of harassment and hate mail received. Anecdotally, the women writers I know (especially those who are open about their feminist beliefs) get much more hate mail than the men writers I know. There is some evidence to this effect: One study by the University of Maryland showed that people with female usernames are 25 times more likely to experience harassment.

...