Tomorrow Museum - Latest Comments in Where Are the Renaissance Women?

Re: Where Are the Renaissance Women?

mikimou — Mon, 17 May 2010 21:16:34 -0000

I think we are facing the same problem feminism has been facing since the early days. Women look at what men do as the right thing; not only right but "normal", "universal", instead of just "masculine" (read this word in a good or bad way). And so they complain about not participating or obtaining this “universalness”; when this behaviour is just a 50% of the universal behaviour (constituted by both masculine and feminine).
These idea books –of the ones you've mentioned I've read all of them :o) – are just pure masculine arrogance (don't want to make this sound really harsh), or put another way, the way men convey ideas in front of other people.
Whether it be Slow, The Wisdom of Crowds, The Selfless Gene, Flow or Sync, these books are just an idea, just one, that can be explained, and understood, in 20 pages or less and 6 examples or less. But the male way forces you to, first, try to find a boombastic name for your theory, and then come up with 5000 examples. That, and the publishing industry's conception of what a "proper book" is, make you write, say fill, 230 pages to explain some simple (deep and full of repercussions as it may be) thought/idea in an endless essay [as an aside note, one of my big todo projects is to really analyze this magic number, 230 pages seems to be the magic number of pages one seems to need to explain a theory, all essays seem to float around that number].
I entirely agree with you on why women don’t do this, the lack of confidence and external reassurance is obvious and that should be solved as a problem in itself, but I do not see the need for women to "compete" or enter this way of writing/explaining ideas. It would be just to do it the male way, as a proof of concept: "see? we can write these ideas just like you" instead of “yeah I thought so too, but I do not need to prove to my other colleagues/the world how I outsmart them” [you can insert here any explanation of the female way if mine is not in the neighbourhood, but I think you get the point].
I can’t help but think about women in the eighties, almost dressing like men, carrying suitcases instead of handbags, and being just as stupidly aggressive as men in meetings to prove they too could be stubborn in getting a point across. I’d like to think we’ve passed that, but every now and then this impulse pops up when we see feminine underrepresentation in a given area.

Re: Where Are the Renaissance Women?

BethanyTri — Sun, 09 Aug 2009 18:09:04 -0000

How many great authors are slipping through the net because they are unproven? Everyone has to start somewhere and, sadly, the bias against young female authors is still very much alive.

Re: Where Are the Renaissance Women?

irsbod — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 03:51:03 -0000

Are big publishing houses still not giving women a fair chance? Surely they'd be mad to adopt this attitude.

Re: Where Are the Renaissance Women?

vpostrel — Sun, 25 Jan 2009 18:24:41 -0000

I wonder if a publishing house would buy Gödel, Escher, Bach today, regardless of its author's gender.

Re: Where Are the Renaissance Women?

vpostrel — Sun, 25 Jan 2009 18:20:26 -0000

At the risk of generalizing wildly from a single datapoint--my own work--the market for synthesis rather than polemics, journalism-you-can-use, or narrative is miniscule, regardless of gender. Even Malcolm Gladwell presents most of his work as profiles, complete with the personal descriptions that so annoyed Richard Posner when he reviewed Blink in The New Republic. That said, women are even less interested than men in reading, or producing, work without lots of personal content. Hence, the brilliant but stereotypically female essays of my Atlantic colleagues Caitlin Flanigan and Sandra Tsing-Loh.

For the record, my second book, The Substance of Style, did not fall into the libertarian-politics category. It did have more female readers than TFAIE, but, as far as I can tell, men still predominated. Subject matter also makes a difference. The book I'm working on now, about glamour, is by far the biggest big-think thing I've done and will probably have a higher percentage of female readers than either of my first two books.