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.
Clarissa's Blog 
Fair enough, I think the author of this post is sarcastic about those stupid elevators.
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Yes, but what an endlessly boring “And then they say. . . and then the others respond. . .”
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I agree, this is not very interesting.
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Being an IT person myself (that is why I asked for your opinion), I too have noticed increased social limitations in some IT folks. I can’t cite s study, but it seems to be that this depends on the size of the IT/Programming/Network department they work in. As a rule of thumb, the larger the department, the more inept they are. I have met programmers from 5 person companies who were social wunderkinder and programmers from huge programming mills who pretty much spend their entire life among other IT folks.
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Everything you say today inspires me to write a post: https://clarissasblog.com/2013/06/10/lets-share-funny-stories-about-programmers/
Do keep this on! 🙂 🙂
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I couldn’t read that article either. It went on for a very long time. Explaining the point in two or three sentences would have been nice.
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““Why do I have this overpowering need to meet whiny programmers, angry Hispanists, etc.?”
It seems we send out signals broadcasting our propensity for symbiosis. Of course that is not the only reason why we can come across a flood of a particular type of person. It might be that a particular culture or subculture is actually producing them that way. It could also be that we are susceptible to these because we have not built up a sufficient immunity to them though exposure.
As an example, it took me a long time to discover what types of people existed in the post-migrational culture and the kinds of pitfalls they represented to my personality. The very drawn out learning process was also a process of learning about myself and my reactions.
I eventually found I don’t get along well with those who subscribe to identity politics, whether that may be the identity politics of the left or the right. Both lots of these denizens do me great harm.
On the other side of things — the non-practical side–we do tend to conjure up a certain type of person if we mention them enough in the public sphere. If we obsess about them, suddenly they appear before us. I think there is a certain level of intuitive awareness that some people have, that draws them to us.
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