Blogging 3:1

Sleep seems to be "optional" for me these days. Don't know if it's age or a consequence of the aromatase inhibitor I'm taking. In any case, I don't sleep that well. But at least I used my "free time" to catch up on twitter. A tweet from AbelPharmboy led me to this article about science blogging by women in Seed magazine. It shows that in the blogosphere,

Despite the fact that women are getting science PhDs in nearly the same numbers as men, they are blogging much less

I have a simple theory about this......time. Maybe I'm just "time-challenged" but if I'm going to blog about something, I need to find the time to read, organize my thoughts and write the blog. This has to happen (at least for me) very late at night or very early in the morning. You see, when I get home after full work day at my science job (usually after picking the kids up from afterschool), I walk in the door, drop my bags and go straight to the kitchen to make dinner for the family - SciDad, SciYing and SciYang. Now that SciKids both have homework, this is happening at the kitchen table while I'm cooking. When dinner is over and SciDad cleans up the dishes, I'm getting dessert. Then the kids go off to their thing, and SciDad sits down to do his stuff. I'm have school necessities, grocery lists, laundry needs, planning the next day's schedule, filling out all kinds of paperwork and forms for this and that (Girl Scouts, medical forms, school event tickets etc. etc) to handle. By the time I can actually sit down, there are work emails and such to answer or act on. If I want to read my RSS feeds, twitter posts or interesting blog posts, it's now 10pm or later. I don't usually get to bed until midnight and then it starts all over again early the next morning.

So I personally think part of the discrepancy in numbers of women blogging vs. men (and it's just my opinion) is that women with families don't have the time to blog. Many of the science women blogs I follow can have weeks or months between posts. If other women have a solution to finding the time, I'd be open to trying it.