Reader Tim asked me to take a look at this article titled, “Why do women try to get ahead by pulling men down?”
The moment I see a title that says things like “Why do women / men. . .” I can’t read any further. These generalizations tell us absolutely nothing about the world. They tell us a lot about people who project their own experiences on the world and hide behind the generalizations from an honest discussion of him or herself.
For people who are really interested in why women in the US are not very present in STEM fields, I recommend turning away from chatty articles about elevators and towards real scholarship. Delusions of Gender by Cordelia Fine is based not on strange fantasies about elevators but on a mile-long bibliography and years of scholarly research.
The only part of the linked article that I found interesting is how it presents people in IT as childish, whiny and immature beyond belief. I grew up surrounded by programmers who were constantly congregating at our house. (They worked with and later for my father.) The programmers (of both genders) that I have met throughout my life were exactly like the ones described in the linked piece: very socially and intellectually limited in all areas other than the area of their expertise.
I’m in no way suggesting that all IT people are like this, of course. I’m saying that the ones I have met are. And we tend to encounter exactly what and whom we passionately want to encounter. This is why I suggest that if you keep meeting whiny programmers (nasty women, immature men, angry Hispanists), you don’t ask, “Why are programmers whiny, women nasty, men immature and Hispanists angry?” Instead, I believe it is a lot more productive to ask, “Why do I have this overpowering need to meet whiny programmers, angry Hispanists, etc.?”
We can never hope to know anything about all women, all men, all truck drivers, or all schoolteachers. We can get to know a lot about ourselves, though, and that’s a lot more useful than generalizing about programmers or anybody else.
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