Just wanted to share two studies/articles that I found really interesting in the course of my research for the representation of women in Cdn politics paper:
First, “Invisible Feminists? Social Media and Young Women’s Political Participation” by Julia Schuster. She interviews 40 women of all ages and she found that there’s a generational divide between “young” (under 30 years) feminist (some didn’t self-identify as such) and “old”. Basically the old women thought the there aren’t really anymore feminists because these politically active communities online were not visible to those who didn’t know where to look for them (ie. young people who regularly used the internet).
I always get a kick out of formal academic studies which back up what my friends and I talk about conversationally. I mean we sort of gently rib the SJW on Tumblr, but some of the older women they interviewed were genuinely concerned that there was no one to carry on their legacy.
On a daily basis, I am barraged by people sharing links to the site “upworthy”, and I personally follow many facebook pages which talk about issues of feminism, politics, equality of opportunity etc. This has been called “slacktivism” because people simply clicked a button to showed they cared without taking concrete IRL action. I just thought this had an interesting take on the whole online political engagement.
Anyways I’m using the above article to talk about how women are becoming differently engaged because online and informal forms of political participation are simply cheaper, more accessible, and give you the ability to find those with common belief and ideas. Whereas “institutionalized” forms of political participation are time consuming, expensive, and often require specific skillsets.
Another article is “Same Game, Different Rules? Gender Differences in Political Participation” by Hilde Coffe and Catherine Bolzendahl. It hypothesized the same general idea: that women are engaged differently then men. It’s also interesting how she talks about previous studies indicating that women were less engaged in politics and point out that they base their definition of political participation on institutionalized forms, such as voting, campaigning, etc.
heiding away. 