That's a very good question Ed. We know from our own Insight Report that marketing as a profession is pretty evenly split between men and women, so I guess its that women are a little more backward coming forward.

Can anyone recommend and/or nominate good women bloggers on B2B issues?

Perhaps its a little like what happens in the roundtables that we run - often the men compete for attention, and to have their view heard, whilst the women are more content to sit back and listen.

@Edward: What a complete load of rubbish. In fact I think you will find it was a WOMAN that pushed for B2B marketing to start a blog. And yes a WOMAN that created the blogging strategy. I was a blogger on this blog until I moved company, and before that I was busy blogging on my other 3 BLOGS!

But I agree that this particular blog should have more female bloggers and it's a good idea to do a call out. At the same time I think this blog has too many "top dogs" doing the blogging, I think it would be more interesting to have more junior people that actually 'do the work' kind of people blogging. An acccount executive or a marketing manager and not just the MDs of companies, they hardly get time to do what they preach about anyway.

Lisa Myers (nee Ditlefsen)
Founder, Verve Search
http://www.vervesearch.com/blog
http://www.seo-chicks.com
http://www.searchcowboys.com

Hi Lisa,

Thank you for your comments. I wasn’t involved in setting up the blog or privy to the strategy so all I can comment on, is what I see – B2B Marketing no women, FT.com no women.

If this blog does encourage a call out that is a good thing, if someone does some research it could be interesting, if I get a slap at the B2B Awards, that would be a shame (http://www.b2bm.biz/awards/ ).

Regards,

Ed
WWW.CONCEPGLOBAL.COM
Concep
http://twitter.com/edweatherall

The only evidence I can provide to backup my opinion is anecdotal so take from that what you will.

In my experience it varies from industry to industry, programming for example is very male dominated and this shows through in terms of blogging.

Marketing however I've found to be far more even in gender representation, weighted even towards women bloggers.

Joel, shame on you for such a wind-up: 'backward coming forward', content to sit back and listen'...bit unworthy of you. And it's interesting how lowly you seem to rate the value of listening at your roundtables.

But it would be equally shameful to waste my very precious blogging-related time responding to your not-so-subtle goading.

Ed has uncovered an interesting trend, esp in terms of comparison with the US. I'm American (and female, btw), but I work in London and I blog for Base One on our Beyond blog. Not sure where I fit in the comparative stats, then, but one of the main reasons I blog is that I consider it part of my job as a senior copywriter.

Of course, you don't have to be a seasoned writing pro to blog, but in the biz-blogging arena, it helps. I recall reading in the Aquent Orange Book a few years ago that copywriting in the UK was significantly male dominated (I don't have the reference to hand or I'd cite it more specifically). Perhaps we can extrapolate from this that UK women interested in advertising and marketing generally are not encouraged to write and publish as much as their male compadres are? Or that it's a catch-22 situation in terms of role models?

In any case, I seriously doubt UK female marketing professionals fail to see the value of blogging and other social media. In fact, Jennifer Handbury, Susanne Wraight and I were the main figures championing the initiation of the Base One Beyond blog last year. Without our overtime hours and undeniably unquiet voices it simply would not exist. And now...well, now posts from female authors make up only one-third of our blog content. I myself have slipped off the blog radar lately due to new management duties.

Which brings me to my best guess as to why there may be fewer UK female online contributors. It's that 'unsung heroes' bit you mention early on in your post.

I have no statistics handy to prove it, but in my 15 years of workplace experience, I've seen that women are much more likely than men to be cast in the ongoing, unofficial 'helper' role. Meaning: we're more likely to be asked to ditch our priority tasks and pitch on other things. Men are expected to focus; women are expected to multi-task. It's quite possible we simply do not (or are not allowed to) protect our time as well as we should, and we're too busy trying to do...everything.

How does this relate to the lack of female figures in UK social media? Unless it's one's stated job, participating in blogs etc is an 'extra'. And (if you accept my theory for a moment) the ladies of B2B are already scrambling to manage their client work plus a whole lot of unacknowledged 'extra' already.

And why the UK/US split on the subject? Well, as you can see and probably assumed anyway, Americans never shut up - we vocalise offline, online, and probably in our sleep! ;o)

PS: Joel, clearly you haven't invited my esteemed former colleague Lisa Ditlefsen to a roundtable in a while...

I have no evidence to support this, so really its just a theory rather than a viewpoint.

Contributions to blogs such as this tend to be by invitation - so B2B marketing blog is written by someone who knows someone etc. So perhaps the gender divide of the blog is determined by the people who create it rather than the people who use it?

Just because women aren't on this blog, doesn't mean they aren't out there using social media to share information and skills with other B2B marketers. Perhaps they are just using other forums to do it? Twitter, LinkedIn Groups and dare I say it, rival blogs?

And of course, not everyone always feels like they have to say something just for the sake of it. Just because we're not commenting, doesn't mean we're not listening :-)

Personally I'm not bothered about the gender of the blogger, if they have a good idea I'm happy to borrow it whether they're male or female.

Ed, you really are reaping the whirlwind! And it seems I am too...

Noel - my comments about women being prepared to listen more were certainly not intended to goad! As I hope some of your existing colleagues will confirm, I'm a big fan of people who listen more than talk - I generally find them easier to interact with, and what comes out of their mouths is generally more interesting.

However, in a roundtable environment, more is more - the success is measured by how much interaction and contributions are being generated.

I think the fact that marketing is a very mixed professions is one of its greatest strengths, and why it's one of the nicest places to work. Come on everyone: group hug...!

The great thing about web 2.0 is the ability to make conversation and hasn't Ed created one here! An interesting topic and nothing wrong with a little controversy...let's keep it going and well done to (my colleague) Ed for appealing to our emotions. I'm off to write my blog now (I'm an Australian, former resident of the UK, now living in New York...and a male).

I'm a female B2B marketer and blogger... busy on LinkedIn, Twitter and my own blog. Not convinced my gender matters to anyone (except maybe my husband ;) if the ideas are good and the results are there for all to see, who cares?

Maybe we're all too busy working? Not like the men in this country.

I'm a woman blogger for small businesses.

http://blog.verticalresponse.com

Women are too busy doing other more important things maybe

I'm a female B2B marketer and an occasional blogger. You mention that there is an even split of male and females using B2B marketing but mostly men on the blog - Maybe that suggests that you are not effectivley communicating to 50% of your market?

Sometimes it's really that simple, isn't it? I feel a little stupid for not thinking of this myself/earlier, though.

It is also interesting that all the bloggers are agency/vendor side. Isn't it time that client side voices had the chance to be heard? Male or Female?

I'd love to sound off about not having had my budgets agreed in January....or any time in Q1...

I'd love to hear the experiences of other client side B2B marketers struggling to understand how thier objectives were set and handed down and how the hell they are going to achieve them given that the most rigour placed on deciding them was looking at what has previously been achieved, doubling it and then doubling it again whilst halving the budget...(not yet agreed)

I'd be intrigued to hear how others deal with US HQ (interesting article by ED W re: Merry, Merry...) and how it impacts creativity, execution and results elsewhere in the world....Do they really know best?

Agencies/vendors provide only 50% of the B2B Marketing story and if that 50% is being contributed by only 50% then there is at least 75% of B2B Marketing still to be set free...

Female Marketer Client Side

Hello Female Marketer Client Side,
We're always keen to hear people's views from all areas of B2B marketing. If you would like to contribute a guest (or regular) blog get in touch with me anna.goldie [@] b2bm.biz,
Anna (Online editor)