Gender Identity and Credibility in the Blogosphere

CBCnews recently ran a short article about a popular blogger who revealed themselves to be a woman using a male pen name. After she started using the name James Chartrand:

"It was pretty much instant respect," Chartrand said in an interview Thursday with CBC Radio's As It Happens.

"[Clients] were asking questions. They were listening to my advice," she said. "They were accepting it. I was spoken to with respect, with no disparaging remarks. My income went up. My rates were not argued with and haggled with. It was quite a difference."

Chartrand, who did not reveal her real name, said her rates more than doubled and that the change could not be explained by experience or technology. (CBCnews)

I wasn't at all staggered to read this. The people who write the articles, books, blogs, who speak on television, radio, in parliament... essentially, the people who have an active voice in the discourse of society are overwhelmingly men. I don't know if this is part of the ugly perpetuation of patriarchy and hegemony, or the result of ongoing and tiresome stereotypes about men and women, or the plain manifestation of our oppressive cultural narrative. But it sucks. And all of this shittiness that goes on offline spills over into e-culture.

But while other bloggers have accused Chartrand of selling out, I can't really blame her.¹ It's fucking hard to write when credibility is largely attributed to men over women. And it's hard to know what to do about it. Obviously, using a male pen name only simplifies things for one person- it doens't make any kind of macroscopic difference. It really just reinforces the status quo. But I think it is important that Chartrand wrote about it and identified the problem, even if she didn't intend to actively pursue it.


¹ At one point, I wanted to be a composer. I loved arranging and improvising music and thought I was pretty damn good at it. But whenever I printed sheet music off, I would enter the genderless 'A. Wilson' where the composer's name went, acutely aware that it was men who got to write all the music for movies. I was thirteen.