published a short paper I co-authored with Mark Pack looking at the gender balance in digital politics and showing that, whilst women might be equal users of the internet, they’re getting left behind when it comes to taking an active part in digital politics. The research shows that80% of political blogs are by men, when it comes to local government the figure’s even worse – 93% of blogs are by men. And its not just the writing, women aren’t commenting as much either, the data we looked at for LibDemVoice shows that 90% of comments on the blog are by men. The number of women bloggers is almost on par with women’s representation in wider politics – 20% of political blogs, 22% of candidates in the 2010 general election and the same percentage of MPs are women. One little glimmer of balance comes from Twitter, which seems to be perceived as less combative, negative and aggressive than blogs. Forty-nine percent of Labour’s female MPs use Twitter, with broadly similar figures for the other parties. Of the new intake, 55% of the women in it now tweet. Read the paper here… ]]>