I told Lynne in November that I'd like to read more cycling posts:
So perhaps it’s not just the division of labor in the household, but perhaps there’s a gender difference in terms of breadth and variety of interests, and interest in focusing intently on one thing or very few things. I spend a lot of time and energy on things that I don’t think would be interesting to KP readers; in fact, back in 2005 I distinctly remember posting a few times about cycling, running, triathlon race results, and I got an email from a reader basically saying that I should stick to economics because he wasn’t interested in reading about my sports. Fair enough. But with RSS readers, it’s easy to skip those. Still, I’ve really backed off writing here about the non-economics topics that captivate me.
Which brings up another hypothesis tangentially related to the one that Diane offered: perhaps women are more “self-censoring” than men. After receiving that feedback, I really dialed in my self-censoring, asking myself every time I read something or thought about posting something “do I have something original to add to the conversation, to economic knowledge, on this item?” Frankly, a lot of the time over the past couple of years my answer to that question has been NO, not that I’m judging myself as a non-”excellent” economist because of that. So much of the online conversation over the past couple of years has dealt with macro, finance, monetary policy, all of which are topics in which I profess no special expertise. Does that filtering and self-censoring kick in more readily for women than men? Perhaps. In my case it’s because my time is so scarce and has such a high opportunity cost — if I’m just going to write something in which I blather on a topic about which I have little expertise, I’d rather spend that time on my bike.
And env-econ is evidence that males don't self-censor. Whenever someone tells me to stick to the environmental economics I say "what? this is my blog!" and start working on my next stupid personal or sports post. Until we're picked up by the New York Times to blog alongside Krugs we'll do what we want.
