The oft-trumpeted Year of Twitter is drawing to a close, and the three most-cited lists for Top 10 Tweets of the Year include three women. Total.

Both Buzz Marketing Daily and Time included Oprah, and the latter also made room for Miley Cyrus’s tweet about her boyfriend insisting that she quit the site. Politico listed Sarah Palin’s hyper-viral tweet on death panels. (To be fair, the lists also included some genderless users, such as The White House, Google, and an Iranian protester of unknown gender.)

Although 2009 included at least one other high-profile male-centric list, gender-biased lists from Twitter are particularly maddening, since the site represents one of the purest forms of free expression: anybody with access to a computer can use it, and — unlike the other social media mogul, Facebook — everybody can access everybody else. Plus, as the tweeting furor following the Iranian election showed, the world really is listening.

So in this case of essentially equal access, the question moves from who’s provided equal opportunity to who’s provided equal attention — and who’s deemed worth listening to. As The Valve’s Aaron Bady put it following Publishers Weekly’s Top Ten [Male] Books of the Year:

An all male list doesn’t just happen. Or, rather, unless you really and truly believe that over half the population of writers just happened to produce truly sub-standard work…this is the sort of experimental result that absolutely screams experimental error. If you flip a coin and it comes up “male” ten times in a row, you are working with a bad coin.

These are bad coins, and they’re made worse by the fact that, unlike Publishers Weekly, none of the organizations bother to acknowledge their focus on men. (In a particularly disheartening move, Women Impacting Public Policy re-posted Politico’s list on their site without objecting to the near absence of women on the list — and Politico’s seeming assertion that Palin was the only woman politically impacting the Twitter-sphere.)

Some insight on this vexing trend is provided by The Harvard Business Review, whichreleased research on Twitter “follower” trends earlier this year. (Users automatically receive updated tweets from other users who they choose to “follow.”) In light of these male-centric lists, the first frustrating revelation is that women hold a majority on the site: 55% of users are women, while men constitute about 45%. Although men and women tweet at the same rate, men have 15% more followers than women, and an average man is nearly twice more likely to follow another man than a woman. (Similarly, the average woman is 25% more likely to follow a man than a woman.)

What this reveals about our collective prejudice — and how much it’s influenced by a bias for male names — remains unknown. But what’s beyond a doubt is the level of influence men still hold; as they retain 97% of clout positions in the media (and are almost twice more likely to follow another man), these lists will continue to be biased. As 2009 draws to a close, the WMC is still wild about Twitter — and proud to have our president’s tweet quoted in U.S. News & World Report — but we’ll be damned if “Top Ten” keeps preceding Top Men.