This is just the nature of things, but men are always a couple of steps behind women. There is a massive organization of women bloggers, several actually, and even a convention that’s been going on for several years. Dads? Yeah, can’t organize their way into a paper bag, let alone into a convention. Alright, so there is one Stay At Home Dad convention, but it’s hard to find and rather anemic compared to what the women have.
Let’s take a quick look at the differences between BlogHer and the Stay At Home Dad Convention.
http://www.athomedadconvention.com/
http://www.blogher.com/blogher-11?from=menu
One is held over three days in a large hotel with a convention center. The other is being held for one day at a middle school. I think the disparity is pretty obvious. There’s a lot more support out there for mothers and networks for “mommy” bloggers as opposed to their male counterparts. I’m sure much of this has to do with the more traditional roles of parenting. I don’t wish to belittle the efforts and work that are being done here on either side of the gender divide, but I just want to point out that… well, it’s still there.
When I started blogging (such as it is) I looked around for some inspiration. There were a few dads blogging about their experiences, but they were far outweighed by the mothers on the internet, by what seemed to be a 5:1 (if not more) ratio. Of the dad bloggers out there, almost half of them were done anonymously or had so much redacted information they weren’t enjoyable.
Looking for a good resource online to be a modern blogging dad (such as how to blog, what to blog about, parenting struggles, etc.) seemed almost nonexistent. I just stuck with a few of the mom blogs, a couple of dad blogs, and let my own contribution wither away. I’d take a stab at it every once in a while, but without much of an online community, I didn’t put much effort into it.
Over the last couple of years, most of the dad blogs that I followed folded up shop. The few I did follow that stuck around talked about attending the annual BlogHer conference, but none ever mentioned a counterpart for dads, or any online network. Heck, a few of them even became speakers at Blogher. Not a heck of a lot of dad-centric attention taking place.
I did come across DadLabs.com at some point, but it seemed more about a couple of guys testing out some products. I hadn’t been to the website in a while, and it seems to have changed, and is much more focused on what I had been looking for initially a couple of years ago, so I’ll definitely spend a bit of time there.
There are a several other mom focused networks and conventions. Mom bloggers have plenty of support. Dads? Not so much.
Alright, so there’s the Dad 2.0 Conference. I had not heard of it before yesterday. It was easy to find once I knew about it. Turns out there’s also one for moms.
I don’t know how long the Dad 2.0 Summit has been taking place, but I suspect it’s a fairly recent occurrence. Both are run by the same company (but information on who is putting it on is fairly hard to come by on the website). My point still remains that there are plenty of events and networks for mommy bloggers, but dads have been largely underrepresented.
Type in “daddy bloggers” into Google and the top result is a website that stopped updating in October of last year. Enough complaining. It’s time to start doing something about this.