Last week’s post about the idea that women don’t write “big idea” books has generated some commentary throughout the blogosphere. “It’s apparently widely believed that we don’t exist,” says Virginia Postrel, who we’re abashed to admit we didn’t include in our initial list of women like Susan Faludi and Naomi Klein who stand toe-to-toe with Malcolm Gladwell and Thomas Friedman in the “big idea” genre. “Maybe because women don’t buy our books?” she wonders.
Over at The Tomorrow Museum, science/technology writer Joanne McNeil isn’t convinced: “I find it hard to believe readership of Freakonomics and The Tipping Point isn’t equal between genders—if not more women reading,” she writes. She’d like to see some data on that—we would, too, actually, as we’ve usually assumed just the opposite—that while women may make up the majority of book buyers, that particular egghead territory feels like one of those subcategories, such as military history, where men are the lead consumers.
But McNeil also comes up with several more women who are writing this type of book, and points us to a powerful essay by Rebecca Solnit that does much to explain why such writers may not be as widely recognized as they should be; short answer: smug know-it-all jerks. And, in a way, isn’t that what inspired this conversation in the first place? (On a side note, Geoff Shandler, the editor of Outliers, the Gladwell book that spurred the initial discussion, pointed out that Gladwell directly tackles “the arbitrary, often sexist ways women have been summarily excluded and denied opportunity and success”—making him part of the solution, not part of the problem.)