Sounds like really bad staff work from the Obama campaign, no way the other campaigns wouldn't reach out to include a more diverse group. Sexism is unusual in modern national Democratic politics. Though given that Obama hired Joe Rospars from BSD as internet director I can't say I'm surprised at the blindness. With initials like "BSD" you know they're compensating for some issues with women.

Aren't Yglesias and Klein both Jews, too? I'm a Jew, and when people start talking about how white male the blogosphere is, I kinda hum and look innocent. Of the big names I read, at least, maybe half are Jews: seems to me that that is a bigger story than all the white men.

(Although I'm not sure where the Jewish women are. 'Digby' doesn't sound Jewish. Marcy Wheeler? Odds are that a good many of the feminist bloggers are Jews, I'd expect.)

An interesting exchange at the bottom of the comments of the post you linked to.  Jennifer Pozner takes offense to being labelled a non-blogger.  Jane Hamsher replies, "I occasionally change my own oil. I don't call myself a mechanic."  Pozner calls Hamsher a hypocrite.

Jews, women, blacks IT TRULY DOES NOT MATTER AS THE WHOLE POINT OF THIS STUPID MEME IS TO THROW US OFF TRACK.

Utter, complete bullshit and from who?

Ellen Goodman?

Puhleeeeeeeeeeeeeeeze!

Let us get back to what we do best.

Hammering the consevative stupidity in this country. This is quite possibley a great starting point.

Something like:

'Who does Ellen Goodman think Jane Hamsher is? A transvestite?'

or...

'Revealed MSM can't tell men from women!'

My guess is that this issue wouldn't be brought up if it were not for the success of a few.  Who knew Kos was a man until he started blogging about fatherhood?  Who knew that FireDogLake was run by woman until breast cancer became a critical issue for her?  The internet strips away many of the biases that exist in the real world.  (Its why pedophiles are attracted to the medium, e.g.) A benefit of the "handles" or pseudonyms that many use is that one cannot cry discrimination when they are not as successful as they would like.  If you want to be widely influential just discuss things that are important to everyone.  

Keep your eye on the prize and you too will be acknowledged.  Start crying about why you're not as important as you think that you should be, and you'll bring the whole progressive movement down.  It has happened before.

I frankly don't think there are enough female bloggers, and those on sites like Huffington Post tend to be really elite.  I do think Jane hits on most of the problem.

as a woman who sometimes reads non-political blogs by women, I think that women in general are reluctant to engage in rough-and-tumble arguments online, and become easily offended when someone does post a critical comment.

I have seen so many threads of dozens of "great post! Thanks so much" comments. When one or two people wade in with a couple of critical remarks, they get ignored or smacked down. I always wonder, what is the point of having a comments section if you're not interested in debating the merits of your post?

I've seen one woman blogger post angrily about the "total strangers" who have the nerve to post "rude" comments on her blog. Why does she have a blog instead of a closed e-mail list for her friends?

My own comments have been screened out by non-political women bloggers who have comment moderation enabled on their blogs. This doesn't happen to me when I post a comment on one of the Iowa Republican blogs.

I wonder if a lot of women bloggers are just turned off by the culture when they wander into a blog where flamewars in the comments occur frequently.

Okay, I'm a woman.  I can debate with the best of them, fast and furious.  But I feel very reluctant to post, although I do, because I find politics compelling.  I am absolutely shocked that I find critical comments by perfect strangers more painful, even if they are exactly the same kinds of comments as those from people I know, many of them rabid right-wingers.  

I have heard that one of the strengths and weaknesses of women is that they pick up body language and facial expressions more than men.  They read people, physically, better.  So face-to-face, we can gage how strong a reply to give or whether in fact we are wandering into a dangerous situation.  But the same words in print are harder to gage and I at least, tend to interpret them as more threatening.  Put another way, when I see a face or hear a voice, I feel affection and forgiveness, even for bigots and loud-mouth idiots, but when I see print, I feel like the voice of God and the multitude is striking me down. Or a lurking rapist.  I admire men because they seem so brave.  My husband, who is a shy guy, has more courage than I to wander into the lion's den.  
I have a blog.  I have never told anyone except about four close friends about it.  I keep thinking, well, it's not good enough yet.  But in conversations, in planes or any random situation, everyone I meet seems to be riveted by my comments, my world view, whatever.  But in this anonymous forum, I am still thin-skinned.  But I'm trying to screw up my courage.  And tell the truth as best I can.
Truth to tell, I have never been close to anyone without their fundamentally moving their world view in my direction.  

And about young women.  Having a baby is a twenty-four hour thing.  It is very hard to turn off.  It is having two full-time jobs and falling in love for the first time in your life all at the same time.  Of course young women should enter the fray, but what they need in this incredibly high pressure, exhausting time of life, is a safe place.  So for about five years per child, most women would probably find it more than they can manage to engage in yet another intense engagement.

... extensively, 'loudly', at length.

This discussion used to manifest itself in the blogosphere as the running joke, if you will, that was the every 3-6mos post by a male blogger wondering where all the women bloggers were. Then they'd be inundated with URL-stuffed comments by female bloggers and our readers.

After that happened enough times to have everyone thoroughly annoyed with the situation, women started being invited to front page at more of the big name blogs. Atrios was quite the early adapter on this score. But Pandagon, for example, used to be run by a couple guys, Jesse and Ezra, until it was turned over to Marcotte. (Jesse's a consultant now and Ezra got picked up by TAPped, for anyone who doesn't remember.) Pandagon used to get linked to an awful lot by the other serious bloggers when Jesse and Ezra ran it, but now they mostly write about women's issues, and that's barely real politics anyway.

I mean, it's polling numbers, horse races, messaging, corruption, the machinery of power and demographic targeting that sum up real politics. Not talking about issues that affect, for example, young and single women; iow, one of the largest underrepresented (and overwhelmingly Democratic) voting blocs in the country. Not talking about issues that primarily affect mothers' lives (as distinct from talking about children's issues and assuming that covers everything), a group that tends to vote Republican but could probably be won over easily, like their social segregation and economic insecurity.

And don't get me started on all the arguments about this at DailyKos. I respect Markos and I like him, but after all the hard feelings and pie wars over the last few years, it's amazing that there's as much of a feminist presence on that site as there is.

I say all this with a particularly bitter dose of self-deprecation, because I also too often fall back on my own internalized prejudice against women's issues as serious politics and don't write about them as a first pick when I have a bigger audience. And very few of the female bloggers who have been mainstreamed and big-timed talk consistently about women's issues beyond abortion, which seems to be accepted as a serious topic because the Republicans talk about it all the time. Maybe it's because I've never seen a guy get the cold shoulder after expressing interest in something that could be regarded as frivolous, like a bunch of rich jerks tossing a ball around on a big lawn, but the reverse ...

Anyway, what seems to be the case to me is that it's women's issues, not strictly speaking women themselves, that sometimes appear to turn off the interest of most guys like flipping a switch. Maybe they're afraid that caring about income inequality or family leave is the demasculating political equivalent of being caught at a chick flick without a girlfriend as an excuse, but when it's only women talking about it, there's a social dynamic that makes us feel like whiners. Or maybe they're worried that if they talk about things wrong they'll get crucified, so they say nothing; I have that worry as a white person when I talk about racial politics, except not talking about it just makes it worse. It makes women feel like they have to talk like one of the guys to be accepted, and the near invisibility of the feminist blogs among the linking habits of the big name poliical blogs really reinforces this. No one has to say anything, either. It just seems that way, but mysteriously, it seems that way to an awful lot of people that no one said anything to. If you see what I mean.

On another note, women obviously have a wide variety of interests. I enjoy writing about the environment and agriculture, I don't need to be pressured into it, it pleases me of its own accord. There are times when I resent the implication that I'd ought to write about women's issues, just because. I don't think I'd feel that way if they were more broadly discussed, certainly not if more men did it. Which is to say that whether I wrote about them more or less often, I doubt I'd wonder sometimes if I was writing about them solely because no one with a bigger megaphone than me was paying attention.

Progressive US blogs don't exist outside their culture. It's absolutely true that the wider society we live in has incredibly narrow views of gender roles, even now. That the desexualizaton/masculinization expected of women who attain prominence on merit has persisted literally since ancient times and was unlikely to be completely overturned in a scant handful of generations (lifelong celibacy is no longer expected, but pressures against motherhood for successful women remains strong.) That when men engage in activities or on issues perceived as feminine, they run the risk of both losing status and alienating the people they're trying to reach out to, so they tend not to. That mocks women for taking time on their appearance and being interested in beauty standards and fashions, but treats them as inherently unsuitable partners if they don't spend a lot of time trying to conform to them. That treats the opinions of a woman deemed unattractive as less valid when talking about gender issues, because her lack of male approval and legitimation on that basis automatically detracts from her standing.

And I'll tell you, because this obviously doesn't affect reactions to me online, I've never been taken quite as seriously overall by strangers in my life as in the year and a half since I took to wearing a buzzcut. There was a bad dye job, and I got to liking it short, but it so effectively desexualizes me in most people's eyes that I can still get treated like a person instead of a woman (some of you know exactly what I mean,) even if I'm wearing a tight pink tank top and a pink flowered skirt. That's the society we live in; all of us, and all of them.

So for the media to look at the blogs, and complain about our makeup only makes them a huge bunch of hypocrites. Particularly when their reporting consistently ignores and devalues women's issues, they won't even report accurately and fairly on the crucial health issue of abortion, and when they grossly stereotype prominent women or use feminine descriptors as insults towards male politicians.

Blog culture isn't perfect, but the press can go take a flying leap on this. They've got no moral standing in the matter. The blogs, at the least, seem to be steadily making positive change over a much shorter time horizon than any comparable, large cultural institutions. I see that people try, even when they're fumbling, and keep trying even after the inevitable fights break out.

As I said in my last post, even the most annoying of the progressive bloggers seems to me a better bet as a colleague by far than the average bear. The assemblage of people who blog, overall, I've seen demonstrate the capacity for growth as people past whatever got drummed into their heads by the end of adolescence. It's progress, it's something to work with, and gods know I'm still a clueless twit about plenty of things.

Kos has expressed anti-feminists sentiments on many occasions and alienated women netroots like MSOC and the followers of Booman Tribune.  It is sad because I don't think Hillary is a good standard bearer for marginalized women( she is DLC and will sell them out), but Kos's crowd is overtly hostile to them.