Anorak Exemption?

[akirlu]

In a couple of recent, unrelated conversations -- one about the comparative and persistent of absence of women in the computing professions, the other speculating about sexist voting in the FAAN awards -- unconnected groups of correspondents produced rather strikingly similar observations: essentially, that women are just not prone in the same way as men to obsessive monomania. Women don't become alpha geeks in any noticeable numbers. I'm still digesting that one. At first blush, it seems right to me. If I understand the point, this isn't a question of intelligence or ability, but one of disposition. There's a certain personality type, given to coherent-light levels of focus on, and micro-molecular scrutiny of, a single narrow field of interest, irrespective of its marginality. And I can't offhand think of any women who display it.

Then again, maybe I'm suffering from first blush syndrome. Sometimes a hypothesis sounds just ducks to me until someone else pops up with a double handful of counterexamples.

And on the gripping hand, it occurs to me that maybe women are still likelier to obsess about things that are in some sense invisible to me as "interests" rather than practical necessities. If being pathologically house proud is the same sort of thing, maybe women get it too.

I can't really use myself as a good yardstick, though. I'm well into multi-sigma territory, inability-to-focus-wise.

UPDATE 5/31/01 Just to pitch in further controversy into the pondering, does it seem plausible that men are more likely to do solitary geeking than women? It occurred to me that I've met my share of women rockhounds, but they all seem to be in it with their husbands as a sort of social hobby.

Another candidate for hobbies filled with obsessives: birding. Our friend Tina seems at least moderately geeky about birding, but she tells me that the overwhelming majority of avid birders are unmarried men.