Cognitive Daily reports nearly every day on fascinating peer-reviewed developments in cognition from the most respected scientists in the field.
Simon Owens has posted the results of his survey of diversity in the blogosphere at his site Bloggasm.
Here are the results for the blogosphere as a whole:
Male: 69%
Female: 31%
***
White/Caucasian/European: 73%
Black/African: 9%
Asian: 10%
Middle Eastern/Arab: 1%
Latino/Hispanic: 6%
Native American: 1%
This seems about right to me, based on anecdotal experience. Simon also broke down his results by niche. Here are the findings for science blogs (which presumably includes CogDaily's response):
Male: 71%
Female: 29%
***
White/Caucasian/European: 88%
Black/African: 6%
Asian: 6%
One thing I find interesting about this result is the low number of Asians who science blog -- lower even than the blogosphere as a whole. It's possible that the sample size of science blogs was too small to get a reliable result, but I'd have to say that my personal experience bears this out as well. We know there are lots of Asian scientists; where are the Asian science bloggers?
Also, it appears from Simon's sample that women are over-represented among science bloggers: 29 percent, compared to "about one fifth" of the science workforce, according to the recent NAS report.
I do have some questions about Simon's methodology: how were the 1,000 blogs for the study selected? Clearly he didn't just select the Technorati top 1,000 -- we wouldn't have made the cut then. Was an effort made to capture the "long tail" of the blogosphere -- those millions of less popular blogs that make up the vast majority of blogs overall? And what was the response rate? Is it possible that diversity was over- or under-represented because of this?
That said, the study is an impressive accomplishment, certainly the most thorough accounting of diversity of blogosphere that I've seen. I'd add only one point, which I made in my survey response as well: the sheer size of the blogosphere allows anyone to have a diverse experience, whether or not this experience reflects the diversity of the blogosphere as a whole. Even if there are relatively few women science bloggers, I can choose to read proportionately more of them. My experience of the blogosphere doesn't have to be the same as the blogosphere's actual composition.
