Are more men engaged in politics online than women, and if so, why? These aren’t just idle questions.

As we all know, for the first time in the nation’s history, a woman, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, has a real shot at becoming president. She is banking on the idea that women will come out for her in droves. And like most of this year’s presidential candidates, she’s putting time and money into an Internet strategy.

But those two things aren’t necessarily connected. That is, she’s going after women in several ways (house parties, for example). But her Internet strategy is more about having an aggressive, up-to-the-minute, informative Web site, building a presence on YouTube and MySpace, and keeping a hand in the comments sections of mainstream political blogs.

We know that women slightly outnumber men online. But at least anecdotally, it seems as if more men are on the political blogs, writing specifically about politics, reading about politics and putting in their two cents in the comments sections. Did you notice how many more men compared to women submitted videos for the Democratic YouTube debate in July? The pool of videos for the upcoming Republican YouTube debate is similarly stocked with more men.

If the campaigns are trying to reach women-- and they all should be, since more women than men vote and they could determine who gets elected -- are they looking for them in the right ways, in the right places?

I asked our readers if they thought more men were engaged online in politics than women, and if so, why.

Many said yes, guessing that perhaps twice as many men as women, maybe even three times as many men are involved, at least on the traditional politics-oriented sites.

As for why, readers offered lots of reasons, including this newsflash: women are just too busy, often with the household chores that men choose to ignore in favor of going on the computer.

I especially liked this post from Joyce, who described herself as someone who thinks seriously about politics, reads editorials and watches the televised debates:

“More men spend time on computers arguing when there is no football or other organized mayhem to watch on T.V. while the ‘little woman’ is looking after the children, preparing dinner, getting her clothes ready to go to work tomorrow, etc.”

She added: “Women realize posting doesn’t change a thing, so we spend our time more usefully.” Besides, she said of posting, “nobody really bothers to read to the bottom of the posts” and the posts are often redundant.

(Don’t despair, Joyce; we’re reading.)

Other thoughts from readers:

* For men, elections are like sports and they love the horse race. C Ray (gender unknown) put it this way: “I think men are more interested in the competitive nature of the election. It’s like a sport — who will win or lose, who has the best strategy, who is on offense, who is on defense? Men are interested more in the minutiae of the game.” He/she added: “I think women could care less and are more focused on the big picture.”

* Men “like to show off more, like to force quasi-muscular opinions more on the unseen multitudes that they think are eager to hear them, want recognition more,” wrote another reader.

* Many readers note, sadly, that if a woman makes her opinion known, she opens herself up to abuse, thanks to the anonymity and rancor of the blogosphere. One poster who said she is a woman said she posts under fake male names because women “are routinely attacked.” (Along these lines, Jay Rosen, a journalism professor at New York University and a blogger, reminded us about the recent coming out of Digby, a highly respected progressive political blogger whom many had assumed was a man but turned out to be a woman.)

* Abe asked this: “Is it women who aren’t interested in politics or politics that isn’t interested in women?”

* Men and women communicate differently. Sarah writes: “This is a generalization, of course, but much has been written about how men tend toward more problem-solving and direct point-to-point repartee whereas women like to sit down and discuss more details and come to consensus.”

* Do yourself a favor and take a look at post #34 (so good it was duplicated as #41) from “a woman on the inside.” She says that men are not online more than women, they are just louder and more likely link to one another “and build up an echo chamber that reinforces their dominance.” Women tend to work more behind the scenes, she says, and she urges us “to look beyond the incestuous political blogosphere” to local blogs and the so-called mommy blogs. She refers to a number of sites with female voices.

“Woman on the inside” is exactly right. When we started out trying to measure the degree to which women were visible in online politics, we were looking in the wrong places.

For further guidance, I contacted a couple of noted female bloggers _ Morra Aarons, the political director for blogher.com, and Emily McKhann, a highly respected blogger who is a co-founder of The Motherhood and who was recently credentialed to cover former President Bill Clinton’s Global Climate Initiative.

They echoed what some of our posters said _ mainly that women were re-defining politics online, away from conventional male-dominated sites that were obsessed with the horse race and toward sites that wove politics into the fabric of women’s lives. This is an important distinction, and you have to wonder if the campaigns, most of whose Internet strategies are driven by men, get it.

“Campaigns approach women bloggers on the soft issues, like health care,” Ms. Aarons said. “Let them bring the foreign policy debate to the big mommy blogs, which get tons of traffic.”

Standard political blogs are “in-the-weeds stuff, for political junkies,” she said. Women are more comfortable when they can share mutual interests, which is why parenting networks and mommy blogs are so popular. Many are filled with politics, just not in the same old way.

For Ms. Aarons, this raises an age-old question: Can women be taken seriously as analysts if they are not part of the boys’ club? If their own club is separate, can it be equal? Blogher.com held a conference this summer with guest speaker Elizabeth Edwards, a revered figure in the blogosphere. But it drew almost no attention from the mainstream media, much of which later gathered for the better known (male-dominated) YearlyKos convention (which also attracted almost all the Democratic candidates).

For Ms. McKhann, what is happening in the bifurcated blogosphere simply underscores the old saw, “the personal is the political.” The smartest candidates, she said, are those who take seriously the “kitchen-table politics” that “unfold every day on the mom blogs and Web sites.”

“If we’re talking about car pool, what’s for dinner and the war in Iraq all in the same breath, it’s still politics on the blogs and across the Web,” she wrote by e-mail.

Obviously this topic is rich. We have to leave it for now, but you can continue to add your thoughts here. Tell us the sites where you pick up political chatter, even _ especially _ if that site is not devoted to such. When we next appear in this space in a couple of weeks, we’ll look at this subject from the perspective of some of the presidential campaigns.

Thanks for taking time to write. Now, back to the laundry.

 What do you think?

An excerpt:

Whateverlife just sort of happened, another accidental Web business. Originally, Ashley created the site in late 2004 when she was 14 as a way to show off her design work. "I was the dorky girl who was into HTML," she says. It attracted zero interest beyond her circle of friends until she figured out how to customize MySpace pages. So many classmates asked her to design theirs that she began posting layouts on her site daily, several at first, then dozens.

...why more men seemed to be involved in politics online than women. I wondered if you 1) agreed with that and 2) why or why not.

• There are no tech/geek mags for women.  But there are a zillion for men.  So if I want to read something nerdy, I have to suffer through pages and pages of ads for things like Axe Body Spray.
• WIRED magazine online has a cadre of blogs.  They have themes - one for MAC users, one on politics/security, etc...  And, although there is a geek dad - there is again, no blog for geek women.  However their pop culture blog is named "The Underwire" because only people with boobs care about pop culture. Obviously.
  
• The only business magazine aimed at women in Borders has a full on pink cover and articles inside about what make-up to wear to work.  If I wanted to know that I would have just read Cosmo. 

A spokesman for Verizon said the decision turned on the subject matter of the messages and not on Naral’s position on abortion. “Our internal policy is in fact neutral on the position,” the spokesman, Jeffrey Nelson, said. “It is the topic itself” — abortion — “that has been on our list.”

Mr. Nelson suggested that Verizon may be rethinking its position. “As text messaging and multimedia services become more and more mainstream,” he said, “we are continuing to review our content standards.” The review will be made, he said, “with an eye toward making more information available across ideological and political views.”

Naral provided an example of a recent text message that it had sent to supporters: “End Bush’s global gag rule against birth control for world’s poorest women! Call Congress. (202) 224-3121. Thnx! Naral Text4Choice.”

This sums it up best:

Timothy Wu, a law professor at Columbia, said it was possible to find analogies to Verizon’s decision abroad. “Another entity that controls mass text messages is the Chinese government,” Professor Wu said.

UPDATE:

Saying it had the right to block "controversial or unsavory" text messages, Verizon Wireless last week rejected a request from Naral Pro-Choice America, the abortion rights group, to make Verizon's mobile network available for a text-message program.

But the company reversed course this morning, saying it had made a mistake.

She says:

Networking is about creating an extended family. It's about developing connections, caring about people, increasing the size of your "tribe." Most of all, networking is not the awkward social ritual many of us think it is--networking is actually FUN!

Go read it, you'll be glad you did. 

 A: You've studied the cultures of Friendster and MySpace. Do you feel that these sites can change the dynamics of how the sexes interact?

db: Again, not really, for the same reasons as I've stated earlier. The important thing to remember with social network sites is that they aren't about the virtual, they are about modeling offline connections and maintaining them. Gender dynamics are culturally embedded and that means that they seep into the online world.

That said, I think that they open up opportunities for conversation. I remember hearing of a discussion on Flickr between self-identified feminist Americans and women from the United Arab Emirates. The American women were irritated with the UAE women's desire to restrict images of women's tummies and breasts as "pornographic." The American women accused the UAE women of being victims of masculine oppression. The UAE women shot back with something along the lines of, "Why do you need to validate yourself by making yourself available for male objectification?" I found this discussion eye-opening. From the UAE women's perspective, modesty was feminine strength, a desire to be valued for something other than male gaze.

I built a private online community for V-Day organizers. We had so many amazing discussions about feminism, sexuality, identity, empowerment, etc. I think that community spaces that gather people around a shared interest in these issues are far more productive than social network sites, simply because social network sites are meant to support pre-existing networks while community sites are more about helping people gather around an interest.

The whole thing is worth a read - danah discusses the inherent sexism in video games, online communities and challeneges women face in the tech sector.

 (I have no idea why danah boyd is never capitalized properly, but I'm going with it...)

Bring on the tech gear, but don't make it girly: That's what women want, according to a survey released today.

Just 9 percent of the fair sex want products that "look feminine," like a pink Playstation or Hello Kitty keyboards. The remaining 91 percent seek something sleek and sophisticated, more boardroom than teenage bedroom. The data comes from a study, done by the advertising firm Saatchi & Saatchi, of 750 British women age 24 to 45.

The agency says its study indicates it's time for tech companies to go beyond the pink ghetto.

"There are clearly some smart, forward-thinking marketers in the industry, but for some reason, when it comes to targeting women, things haven't moved on," said Belinda Parmar, planning director at Saatchi. "Most women feel cheated when they walk into stores or see ads with baby-pink, diamante-encrusted products."

But that doesn't discourage "lady geeks," as the study dubbed them, from getting the gear. These "empowered" women, 37 percent of the total, owned an average of six devices, including a digital camera, desktop or laptop, multimedia mobile phone, MP3 player, digital TV and handheld game console. Overall, U.K. women own only slightly fewer tech items (11 percent) than men.

"What's fascinating to me about this research is the index of just how much technology women own," said Dr. Genevieve Bell, resident anthropologist at Intel. "Yet we still have these ideas about women and technology that are clearly out of step with the realities of the marketplace."