16.1.11

Women and religious writing




Lesley Fellows writes about the top female Religion blogs. This site is mentioned.

I wonder why there are not more women blogging.

The top 50 biblioblogs suffered the same lack of women blogging biblical studies, although things have improved there of late, well, it's that or people have started to rebel with their own rankings.

I can not quite work out what is going on over at Biblioblogs 50, it all seems to have gone a bit random.

I also remember college lamenting the lack of highly enough qualified female applicants for a post to teach New Testament Studies.

We currently have a Hebrew and Old Testament lecturer who is a woman with us for a year but on the whole our lecturers and tutors are men.

I wonder whether it is that our education is interrupted by the raising of children? Are we able to be less single-minded? Or is there really still some impenetrable glass ceiling?

On the blogging-front, I would not imagine it is because women have anything less to say than men.

Are there cultural and psychological reasons for there being less women? I am not sure.

Any ideas?

3 comments:

Lynne said...

ok, my guess, and it's only a guess, is that it's multifactorial. Certainly here in Australia it starts with a huge sidelining of women -- the (very liberal) Uniting Church is the only major denomination that's really on board with gender equality. And even for those of us who have got our degrees in theology and believe in equality, that still leaves us on the back foot. Personally i mainly stick to creative writing on my blog because a, it's a passion of mine anyway, but also b. I can't be bothered fighting the battle on yet another front.

But most of the blogosphere is not Australia, so I think there are other factors.
Glass ceilings? Of course they exist, it's just a question of how widespread.
Do women prefer to blog/ engage in abstract theology or applied, lived-in-community theology?
Are many women psychologically disengaged from raging theological arguments? (the classic cartoon about "someone is wrong on the internet" shows a maale -- is it more of a male preoccupation?
Are women a bit more timid about mixing it with the big boys?
all these things are only generalisations of course, and gender generalisations always make me squirm, but something ios definitely going on somewhere ..

Rev R Marszalek said...

I think you raise many interesting and likely reasons, Lynne. Thanks for your contribution.

Lucy Mills said...

We're all blogging about it now, at any rate!

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