±«Óãtv

from the Guardian:

"When the Electoral Commission discovered last month that women don't involve themselves in party politics - preferring to vote, sign petitions and talk behind the scenes - worried female columnists in Westminster came up with a variety of explanations.

Women don't like joining groups; they don't like swallowing a party manifesto whole; they think there are too many men in the game, and too few women. These are plausible enough explanations. But the one that caught my eye turned up a few paragraphs down the reports, noted slightly shamefacedly: women have relatively little confidence in their ability to influence the political process.

Never mind the guff about women preferring to vote for women: this is the key finding. Unfortunately, there's no easy fix for a lack of self-belief. Even more depressingly, women's reticence is evident in the bright new playground which the fringes of Westminster are beginning to notice: that of political blogs.
Women do blog. just under 40% of English-language weblogs were owned by men and 36.3% by women (the rest belonged to groups, or were of unknown origin). But BlogCensus also found that nearly half the weblogs surveyed were personal diaries - and in that category, women outnumbered men by about two to one. Fewer than one in 20 of the political blogs was written by a woman."