[Note: Still sick, but couldn’t keep quiet about this one.]

Imagine Caligula without Peter O’Toole and with about a tenth as many women. That is the software development world.

I just read a post [via Dare] in which a “Bloghercon” is proposed. The idea being all the usual late-90s platitudes: Empowerment, equality, blah blah blah.

I guess some people are concerned that there aren’t enough women blogging, and that there aren’t enough women who are “A-List” bloggers.

First of all, screw the A-List! Who cares! Seriously. Did you know that A-List bloggers are just regular losers like everybody else as soon as they step out from behind their keyboards? Try going to a coffee shop with one. Do they get recognized like the rock stars they think they are? Does anybody care? Maybe in certain exceptionally tech-dense parts of the world, but for the most part, no. They’re recognized by those who link to them, and by those who read them, but that’s still a very small crowd.

So forget this A-List stuff. The A-List doesn’t really matter. I’m not even entirely sure it exists, but that’s another argument for another post.

Let’s move on, then, to what appears to be the real problem: Not enough women blogging.

And allow me to say that I don’t really think this is a problem.

To start, I agree with Dare when he says, “I am constantly surprised by the people who read the closed circle of white-male dominated blogs commonly called the A-list who think that this somehow constitutes the entire blogosphere…”

It isn’t so much that there aren’t a lot of women blogging (there are), but that there aren’t many female tech bloggers.

Go out to Blogger sometime and check out random sites (try starting with this post and follow the directions (posted by a woman, no less!)). I used to do this for kicks until I learned that every other site was just another place where some teenage vaginally-endowed person was writing all of her “black rose” poetry about how she was going to hang herself in front of the entire student body if Donny didn’t take her to the homecoming dance [yawn].

One of the best writers I know out there in bloggyland is Monica (although she quit in February, but she was damn good). And she is totally a woman. Boobs, ‘gina, the whole shebang.

But, she wasn’t a tech blogger.

If anybody somehow expected the demographic of the tech blogging world to not mirror the physical side, then he was in a for a big surprise. There just doesn’t seem to be that many women in tech. Why shouldn’t we see that reflected in tech blogger demographics?

Then, there are other things that people don’t seem to be considering.

For example, and this might come as a shock to some of you, but men and women are, like, different.

Look at the animal kingdom – who is often doing the attracting? Who has the brightly colored coat of plumage? The female peacock? The female duck? No! It’s often the banananimal who’s strutting his wares and trying to attract the attention of the other gender.

When certain male primates want to attract a mate, what do they do? They bang on trees - they try to draw attention to themselves.

Isn’t that a little bit like blogging?

Our behavior is a little different in some areas.

And, men and women actually have slightly different brains.

Male brains tend to be a little larger and heavier than female brains.

Females tend to have a larger corpus s(this is a bit of think-meat that binds the two hemispheres of the brain).

Men tend to have about 50% gray matter think-meat, while women tend to have about 55% gray matter think-meat. In case you’re curious, by the way, the gray stuff is what you want, and it’s thought that the larger percentage in women makes up for the slightly smaller brain.

Men tend to be good at spatial problems, and women tend to be good at verbal ones (in other words, men like chess, and women like Scrabble).

The differences go on and on. It has nothing to do with which one is better or worse - they’re just different. And, this stuff isn’t up for debate – we’re dealing with facts. There’s no sexism here.

Frankly, I’d rather have a female brain. While the male brain tends to show a steep decline in verbal abilities past about age thirty, women tend to maintain their abilities throughout their lives. For someone who loves writing, I sure could use those extra few decades.

Anyway, I could go on all bloody day about this, but here’s what I want to leave you with:

Before anybody goes and tries to come up with a solution to the “problem” of too few female tech bloggers, determine first if it is a problem. I’m not saying that it isn’t, but it’s foolish to assume without weighing differences between the sexes that it is.