Seeking Balance

Last weekend  at UCI, I attended a "trans-partisan dialog" organized by women who represented the local leadership of the Democratic and Republican parties, as well as representatives of universities, State and local governments and a Global Matrix of women's groups. The point was to find a way talk about something that wasn't politics, or structure as usual.

They started by taking a council approach whereby everyone around the table was required to speak and more importantly, be listened to.

We had two questions to tackle. The first - "What would it take to have balance in the world"? By that they meant a balance of female and male decision making viewpoints. Now considering that this was a group of highly mainlined and successful women, you wouldn't think that wouldn't be an issue still and yet... there it was on the table, 30 years after Title IX.

At my table sat a former District Attorney, a UCI professor, a woman helping to put on the UN's International Women's Day, a founder of Gather the Women and a college student. After ideas were gathered, shared and posted, then the second question came out, "How could we make that happen"?

Lots of ideas emerged, but none supplanted a blog for getting a woman's voice heard, recorded and recognized as valid or equal.

Virginia Woolf wrote about having a room of her own, a place to create thoughts and write them down. Blogs are that room. She also noted (wrongly) that until women were allowed to go further than the garden gate, that they didn't have a lot to share and discuss. The plethora of blogs that cover just the Mommy Blogger experience alone sure rules that one out. Their "gated" community reaches around the globe and back and you don't see them parking their brains at the mall.

I explained to the non-bloggers that unless they put their thoughts in writing, that few will hear the first thought and no one will hear it 5 years years from now. I compared it to reading the history books for the American Indian.... oh, that's right there aren't any books because Indians had an oral history and didn't write anything down. It's also said that history is written by the winners. With blogs we ALL are winners and both genders can add as much of themselves to the history pages as possible.   

4 days later...

I caught the Umbria webinar on "Blogosphere: Greenfield or Minefield"? [It was excellent.] Umbria does blog analysis. They scanned and found 160,000 blogs talking about Sustainability/Climate Change issues based on "green" type words in the content. What was really interesting is that they could loosely tell who was talking, i.e. men, women, Gen X, Y or Boomers based on language use. That was a first for me. I've asked Neilson Buzz Metrics if they could do that and they said, no. (maybe they just no to me)

From this exercise they were able to determine who cared more about green (which was women) and who were more socially active (again, women) and therefore more likely to act sustainably. In other words, what happens on the ground was being duplicated on the web. No surprise there. The difference is that on the Internet, what's said is being captured and analyzed for intent and purpose.

[Go to http://www.umbrialistens.com/ and download the copy of the presentation. It's quite the eye opener for novices and professionals alike.]

So there you have it. If you want to equal the estrogen/testosterone ratio of thinking, post your thoughts on a blog. Make your words part of the conversation that business and politicians are paying to measure and react to. If things aren't changing fast enough for you, get MORE people to write it down. The blogosphere is democracy at it's collective best.

 

Comments

[LA Blogger Gal]

Just wanted to let you know...when read in Google Reader, your posts have no spaces between the paragraphs. It all looks and reads like one giant paragraph.

I know that I can always come directly to the site to read, but I tend to find it easier (and quicker) to read directly though my Reader. I'll keep reading either way, I just wasn't sure if you knew how it looked through RSS.

[Mary]

Thanks for letting me know about the big block-o-type. I'll see if that can be corrected.

[marguerite manteau-rao]

Good stuff, Mary. I've got to check that Umbria webinar.

You are right, blogs are such a wonderful way for all to turn thoughts into realities. This is why I love the Internet and technology!

http://lamarguerite.wordpress.com