I listened to most of Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers in the car with my 15 year-old son this past weekend on the way to Tahoe. Its a good read, and sparked a fair bit of conversation with my teenager (and that's always a good thing) about the importance of hard work and practice, the benefits of parents that provide good environments (phew!), that smarts (IQ) is not enough, and learning how to spot and take advantage of opportunities. All good.
But what if my 15-year old were a girl and not a boy?
After the section on the importance of background, it didn't take long for Christopher to comment "and of course what a great advantage to be born a guy." '
Women, successful women, are hardly mentioned at all in the entire book. Gladwell doesn't even mention that women are missing nor does he go so far as to apologize for it. Women are just not there. The book is shock-full of examples and statistics, anecdotes and family stories, and the only place where women appear are in a discussion of Gladwell's mother (who he admires) and a helpful wife or two behind successful men.
I also find it surprising that mainstream reviews of the book, including NY TImes, Wall Street Journal, San Francisco Chronicle, do not mention the lack of women (I didn't check the gender of the reviewers). Many of the reviews are critical - note that his conclusions are not always supported by research - or that some of the stories are somewhat obtuse or individualistic (Oppenheimer vs. Langham?). Excuse the high expectations, but shouldn't reviewers take Gladwell to task for leaving out women?
Julia Cheiffetz on the Huffington Post remarks: "The omission of women in Outliers says more about the nature of "big think" books than it does about Mr.Gladwell" pointing out that most of the writers of these books are men and that women ought to publish their own "big think" books. But is that the story?
My POV: Malcolm didn't think it makes a difference and no one else did too. But reallY?
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