Comments on: Why women don’t get ahead

By: mo

mo — Sun, 24 Jan 2010 22:30:03 +0000

It’s true though. Like Shirky said, no girl I know would ever do that. Relating back to your girls-in-Computer-Science post, I’ve also never really heard girls boast about their abilities in the same “I’m-all-that” (arrogant?) way that guys do. “I aced that” comes out of dude’s mouths and I’ve learned over the years that attitude doesn’t bear much relation to actual abilities one way or the other.

Anyway. Didn’t comment on your last post but I’m very interested in this topic, as a younger woman in the field. Keep blogging :)

By: Eponymous

Eponymous — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 18:06:10 +0000

@cdespinosa Right on brother.

By: cdespinosa

cdespinosa — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 06:29:01 +0000

There are two things that Shirkey completely misses in his piece.

First, he takes it for granted that a world where more people are arrogant self-aggrandizing jerks is better. No, it’s not.

Second, he commits the classic fallacy of presuming that since most arrogant self-aggrandizing jerks are men, men therefore are arrogant self-aggrandizing jerks by nature.

This is annoying to those of us, men and women, who have become successful without being arrogant self-aggrandizing jerks.

Non-jerk men and women have plenty of other paths to success and power. And jerkiness is by no means a ticket to success—look at the number of arrogrant self-aggrandizing people who are TOTAL LOSERS. There are probably more of those than there are successes.

What this comes down to is that Shirkey lives in, and is actively contributing to, a reward system where he helps jerks succeed whether they deserve it or not. And that’s his problem, and he should just stop doing it.