Snapshot Chronicles

Susan Getgood's personal blog

Quick update

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For those of you interested in the Africa pictures, I’ve posted a few more days to Flickr but have been woefully pathetic about getting the posts about the trip up on the Roadtrip blog. Hopefully I’ll be able to catch up this weekend.

In other news, I just started writing about digital parenting for BlogHer’s Family Connections project. I’ll be posting there once per week for the next six months or so.

I’ll also be contributing regularly to the blog of B2B marcom and PR firm, Attain Marketing, and …. ta-duh … writing my first book. More on those endeavors next week.

So if updates over here get a bit sporadic, please bear with me, and check out one of the other places.

Women are more than mommies: More Women

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crossposted to Marketing Roadmaps

I’m sure it will be a surprise to the mainstream media, but women are more than mommies.

Many women aren’t mommies at all, for a variety of reasons that are their business, not ours. Those of us that are parents don’t define ourselves solely by that role, even if we write a mom blog. And definitely when we do not write a blog about our parenting experiences. When our blogs are about other things important to us — our jobs, our hobbies, our causes, our politics, our opinions, our rants and our raves.

Our lives. Ourselves.

We find our identity beyond our motherhood. It may encompass it, but women are not simply wombs who walk.

But in the minds of the media and many marketers, women bloggers are mom bloggers. The consumer products companies reach out to moms. The media companies create opportunities for moms. Moms moms moms.

It’s a perennial frustration for women’s blogging community BlogHer, which works overtime to focus attention on the full spectrum of women’s blogging, but regularly sees the media hone in on the one segment. Mom.

Some — myself included — see this repeated reduction of women to our reproductive status as a form of sexism. Moms are about kids. Men are about the world. Moms aren’t serious.

It’s part of a cultural mentality in which a company can argue that lactation is not a condition of pregnancy, and dismiss an employee for taking unauthorized breaks to pump while allowing smoke and pee breaks. Isotoner/Totes, if you are wondering. That Danielle has a nice summary with links to other posts.

Bullshit.

But, you know, we are more than our reproductive organs. Media, marketers should pay attention. We’ve got disposable income. Even if we are moms, we do not spend every cent on floor wax, juice boxes and school supplies. If we aren’t supporting the Disney and LEGO franchises, we’ve got even more money to spend on stuff.

So, why aren’t companies reaching out to us in greater numbers? Why isn’t the media telling the stories about women entrepreneurs, women bloggers, women philanthropists? Grandmas and grad students. Women doing all sorts of things to make a difference in the world beyond just the genetic material we created or might create.

It’s been a refrain for years at the BlogHer conference. This year, the indomitable Grace Davis decided to do something about it. Something to call attention to More Women (than just moms.)

She’s created an online community called More Women.

Why is this important?

If you are a woman blogger, with or without offspring, check it out. We need to make our voices heard as women, not just as mothers.

If you are a marketer, pay attention. We will be heard, and you might want to be among the first to catch our ear.

Laugh if you will. I know the song is a bit hokey and outdated. But for many of us in Generation Jones, it was large part of our development as women and feminists. More than 30 years later, I Am Woman still says we won’t give up.

I am woman, hear me roar. In numbers too big to ignore…

Does mainstream media have mommy issues?

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In April, I wrote a post called Has Dooce become the modern day June Cleaver? It got a bit of attention at the time, especially after PunditMom used it to relaunch her Mothers of Intention series.

Please consider this post the sequel.

In the June Cleaver post, I discussed how mainstream media was re-focusing on women in a very traditional role of mother, tripping lightly over our other achievements, and wondered:

Is the mainstream media stuffing women, in general, back in the mommy box because the US power structure relies on women staying in their traditional gender role? To some degree, I think the answer is yes.

Some people agreed. Others did not. Check out the comments on both sites for the true flavor of the conversation. I concluded the post:

Yes, this mom in the media trend makes me very uneasy. Tell me I’m wrong. I want to be wrong. I don’t think I am.

Sadly, very sadly, media coverage of mom bloggers AFTER I wrote the June Cleaver post has largely been evidence that I was on the right track.

Mainstream media has mommy issues.

Consider:

A May BusinessWeek story, Blogola: The FTC Takes On Paid Posts, led with an example  from a mom blog, and included two other parent blog examples out of a total of four in the story. The outlier was the well-known Microsoft Vista laptops example. In the same vein, a July New York Times feature, Approval by a Blogger May Please a Sponsor, focused on two mom bloggers, although it did include two other examples.

Newsweek asks: Are Mommy Bloggers Corporate Sellouts?

A Wall Street Journal article about the Mom Dot PR Blackout led with: “How can so-called mommy bloggers navigate the murky territory of sharing advice with other mothers versus getting paid for the products they promote?” and proceeded to make the inaccurate statement that the Federal Trade Commission was considering new rules for parent bloggers.

paidContent’s sincere question: When did Mommybloggers become the devil?

The BNET advertising blog’s sensationalist (and inaccurate) post-BlogHer headline: Mommy Blogger Blackmails Crocs Marketer; FTC Poised to Step In.

Just this week, CBS2 in Chicago ran a two-part series with the provocative title: The Secrets of Mommybloggers, leading with: “If you depend on mommy bloggers to tell you about the best diapers or strollers or baby food, there’s something you might not know about them, and it’s something that has some blog readers very annoyed.”

Even balanced pieces about the FTC guidelines and ethical issues focus on mom bloggers, even though the issues are universal.

Why so much focus on moms? Why does mainstream media have such a mommy issue?

The consumer products companies are targeting mom bloggers, and the media loves to pick on write about the consumer products companies. To some degree, moms are caught in that crossfire.

But that doesn’t explain why food, travel, tech and style/fashion bloggers haven’t been subject to the same media scrutiny. It’s not because they aren’t getting free products or trips. They are. It’s not because they don’t face the same ethical dilemmas,  or are somehow more ethical than moms.

To be fair,  from time to time, a story from another sector will bubble up to mainstream media. But it’s nothing compared to the inordinate amount of attention paid to the mommy blogger.

The FTC guidelines will apply to all bloggers. Why are they so often characterized as a mommy blogger issue?

During a podcast interview we recently did about Blog with Integrity,  Liz Gumbinner said, and I paraphrase, that the media like the image of the poor stupid mommy blogger shilling products for peanuts.

It’s a better story. Why?

Why is it better to create a negative perception of the mom blogger, instead of focusing on the many interesting ways women are using online and social media to make money outside the 9 -to-5 corporate space? Opportunities that would not have existed prior to social media.

There’s an unfortunate element of “oh you silly mom blogger” in many of the major media stories, and it’s generally worse in the comments. It feels just one tiny step away from “oh you silly women.”

Which brings us back to the same issues I raised in the June Cleaver post.

Is all of this just a form of subtle sexism that makes it easier to keep women down on the farm, and out of Paris? Is it somehow easier to marginalize women bloggers if they are generally identified as mothers, even though many are not? Are we perpetuating a society where men run the front office, and women are out back and/or keeping the home fires burning? Sure, we can be corporate execs. Some of us can run companies. Big ones even.

But it often seems that the cultural belief is we achieved success in spite of the fact that we are women and sometimes mothers. Not because of it.

There’s more than a little bit wrong with that.

If mainstream media could get over its mommy issues, would stop dividing women into mutually exclusive stereotypes, I believe that we’d be one step closer to fixing the problem.

We just have to stop letting it.