Kevin Drum recently set off a firestorm on the female side of the lefty political blogosphere for openly musing about reasons for the lack of female representation in the (flawed) NZ Bear ecosystem, the embers of which are still raging. Ezra took on the issue here, and a good discussion followed. Ezra subsequently added more female bloggers to his sidebar, including the excellent Julie Saltman. Personally, I don't read or link to nearly as many female bloggers as male bloggers, but I'm not sure I can explain why. Am I a jerk? I didn't have any opinion whatsoever on the Larry Summers controversy, although I think that firing people for things they say once is usually an extreme reaction (there may be other valid reasons for Harvard faculty to toss him out though). But I guess I just don't think about gender very much, and my reading habits have become increasingly narrow. Our beloved Nadezhda, obviously, is female, as are KatherineR and Hilzoy of one of the blogosphere's last bastions of bipartisan discussion, Obsidian Wings. I read them regularly and with gusto. Then there's also Garance France-Rutka of TAPPED (the lone woman!), and the award-winning Jeralyn Merritt at TalkLeft, who I read less often but with similar enthusiasm. I used to read Respectful of Otters but she seems to have disappeared. And then there's the incomparable Belle Waring, who also posts on Crooked Timber from time to time, which has taken up the gender-in-political-blogging thing on numerous occasions, though with little practical effect. And Elizabeth Anderson of Left2Right has become a blogosphere force in an astonishingly short period of time.

Meanwhile, I can't help but notice that, quietly, Big Media Matt has been breaking out of his usual habits and linking to more female writers and discussing gender issues in a more sensitive way than in the past, studiously immune to the slings and arrows directed his way. Sneaky.

UPDATE: I seem to have spoken too soon.