Rivka over at Respectful of Otters gets into the Matt Yglesias female-blogger fray:

The cross-cultural comparisons suggests to me that the more women have reason to believe that their political opinions are valued, the more involved they are in politics. And that’s certainly supported by changes in political involvement as U.S. society becomes more egalitarian: the same article reports that “in the United States in the early 1990s, for example, Burns, Schlozman, Burns, and Verba (1995) found no significant gender differences in voting, protest activity, serving on a local board, or working in a campaign, but they did find gender differences in making campaign contributions, working informally in the community, contacting officials, and political organizational membership,” and notes that the gender gap appears to have closed considerably over time.

It seems that Matthew is taking women’s lesser involvement in a particular kind of political activity - vigorous engagement in political argument - as evidence of lesser interest. Certainly there’s more to political participation than rhetoric, although you wouldn’t know it from reading a lot of blogs. I put more stock in women’s equal involvement in campaign activity, and our greater voting rates. But then again, I’m so vigorous with my rhetoric that people who read my blog have mistaken me for a man - so maybe I’m not the one to ask.

I was too lazy to get into this last night but I’ll take a stab at it now.

Matt attempted to define “informed about politics” by the results of a fact-based quiz which “proved” women are less informed. This is a sticky wicket, and I’ll try to play around it. (I’ll have to speak in some generalities, considering the topic.)

Women started out suspicious of George Bush, and suspicious of this war. Not incidentally, women tend to score much higher than men on what is called “emotional intelligence.” (Basically, we didn’t care what Tom Friedman or Billy Kristol thought about Bush; we already knew - instinctively - he was a lying little weasel. He’s a bad guy in the soap operas, the new guy you know not to trust.)

Now, men seem to feel a compulsive need to make their decisions based on something they like to call “facts” - you know, what Colin Powell cited so persuasively during his U.N. presentation? Or in what purports to be the Medicare budget…

Women know what war is like - not through direct experience, but by the ripple effects on their world. They know schools have less money than ever, and their community suffers for it. They know families who are struggling because of lost jobs, and they know sick people who can’t afford to go to doctors.

Now, ask yourself this question: Do you consider those women to be “politically uninformed”? If so, why? Do they need to graph the raw intelligence from Iraq, the education statistics from Texas? Should they know the GDP trend versus the unemployment numbers?

Should they be able to cite the names of every PNAC signee before they can be trusted to know the Bush administration is full of shit?

I happen to be one of those women who knows a lot of that information; I’d guess I’d score higher on Matt’s test than most men. But I don’t consider that type of information any more important than the other kind.