Who would possibly give more column space to Miranda Devine, after she denied gender was the cause of domestic violence? The editors of RendezView, that’s who.

The website, run by News Corp, is the latest in a new generation of female-focused websites. Launched in March this year, the collection of ladylike columns joins Australian women’s news sites Daily Life (Fairfax), Mamamia, and Women’s Agenda (Private Media). Similarly, in the US, Slate established Double X (re-named The XX Factor) in 2009, Huffington Post has HuffPost Women, and Vice recently launched Broadly.

These pink ghettoes are distinct, but attached, to mainstream media, and the content consists of daily news through a feminist lens, op-eds and personal stories that hum with emotion. “My son has the type of autism no one knows about”, writer Bonnie Zampino lamented in Mamamia last week, while Daily Life published Clementine Ford’s criticism of the fashion industry’s hypocritical body positive messages.

The sites aren’t identical: Broadly’s ideal readers are porn-watching, spliff-smoking bad girls with an eye for justice; Mamamia emerged from the “mummy blogger” era and caters to a more conservative crowd; Women’s Agenda is for the “career-minded woman”; RendezView’s ultimate goal is to be divisive, it seems; and Daily Life deals in politics, fashion, stylish food and outrage. They are safe spaces for writers to #shoutyourabortion, discuss the expectation to have children, and recap The Bachelorette. Readers are expected to have ground knowledge of Feminism 101.

Readers are expected to have ground knowledge of Feminism 101.

The websites are designed to be the “female-friendly version of an existing site,” writes Kate Wilcox in her thesis on women’s media. And they are important as an alternative to the white, male-centric news sites.

We know that authority and commentary in mainstream media is overwhelmingly provided by men. The benefit of RendezView and the rest is that women’s voices are heard and legitimised. Some of these sites also provide a platform to women of colour, who would struggle to be published in conservative press. Celeste Liddle (who also writes for the Guardian) is Daily Life’s authority on Indigenous issues and Ruby Hamad writes regularly about race, politics and prejudice.

Considering we are half the population, female reader make for lucrative ad revenue for media companies – so this explosion of lady sites makes sense. But, golly, if News Corp wanted to attract female readers, couldn’t they be inclusive of women readers in regular news?

Cordoning off feminine views reinforces the understanding that men are default, while women are other. Simone de Beauvoir wrote that woman is defined only in relation to man; while he is both positive and neutral, she is negative. “He is the Subject, he is the Absolute,” she wrote in The Second Sex, “She is the Other.”

Men are everywhere, while women are over there, in a playpen with pictures of yoga poses and celebs’ beards. Women can only speak to women – but men’s opinions are for everyone.

This manifests in many ways, but is terribly obvious when we consider mainstream media. The wider publications connected to these websites (most notably Fairfax’s and News Corp’s news sites) depict and analyse a primarily male experience. A look at The Australian’s opinion page shows the pool of commenters to be flooded with white dudes. Having a vagina is not explicitly outlawed, but is clearly frowned upon. Similarly, in 2011, a study found only 22% of New York Times op-eds were written by women. The male perspective is the default, and women’s sites relegate the female perspective to a separate arena.

The women’s website model allows the ghettoisation of female writers, and the segregation of female issues, replacing mainstream inclusivity. While women can speak freely in our designated, secondary space, we remain relatively silenced in mainstream media.