Mum Bloggers Hit Glass Ceiling

“Mummy blogging” is big business. It is estimated that 15 million women have a blog, and the annual BlogHer event in July this year attracted big name sponsors, including General Motors and K-Y Jelly.

While the movement is still growing in Australia and the UK (who have just launched a ‘British Mummy Bloggers Carnival‘), US mummy bloggers are attracting huge audiences. Heather Armstrong on Dooce, for example, makes enough from her blog ads to support her entire family.

Yet mummy bloggers still come across the same hurdles that women face in the real world. “Women get dismissed in ways that men don’t,” said Megan McArdle, an associate editor at The Atlantic Monthly told The NY Times. She added that women are taught not to be aggressive and analytical in the way that the political blogosphere demands, and are more likely to receive blog comments on how they look, rather than what they say.

And while big business has been happy to use female bloggers to access a lucrative audience of educated, middle-class women, female bloggers say that their male colleagues and major media groups tended to ignore them, and to link to them less often.

When Techcult, a technology Web site, recently listed its top 100 Web celebrities, only 11 of them were women.

But maybe some mummy bloggers aren’t in it for the money. Maybe, like some corporate working mothers, they like the flexibility of part-time work or the ability to work from home while raising a family.

Other mummy bloggers are in it for the community and camaraderie.

What do you think? Are you in it for the love or the money?

[Image courtesy of the NY Times]