Scott Berkun

Where are the female geniuses?

I’m getting a bit of roasting over on Forbes.com for gender bias – there were exactly zero women mentioned in the article.

Women are in fact my favorite half of the species. But my problem is the assumption that omission of diversity implies bias. I happen to be Ukrainian by heritage. Yet, there were zero Ukrainians mentioned in my post. Sure, there are a ridiculously smaller number of Ukrainians in the world than women, but the fact that I didn’t mention any of either doesn’t mean I went out of my way to exclude them.

In a 790 word article it’s not a surprise I used the most well known geniuses I could think of. It makes stronger points, provides more leverage and requires less explaining. All things useful to do in a short piece where comprehensiveness isn’t expected.

To get to the point, the fact is women and most minorities were denied many intellectual and creative opportunities in many cultures through Western history. The right to go to school, to publish, to research were denied and for generations there was an unnatural bias against women and minorities that repressed the possibility of them discovering or displaying their talents.

But regardless of the reason, if you study great creative and intellectual works in Western history, many of them were done by men. This does not mean men are better at becoming geniuses (however you define the term) than women – far from it – it just means that’s what happened. If you talk about innovation history, a disproportionate number of stories will involve men. Same for leaders of nations and authors of books – generally speaking, for hundreds of years, in most of Europe, women were not allowed to do either.

I was asked about this bias by the President of CMU when I lectured there last year, and the above answer is basically what i said then.

I do happen to know of many female geniuses or women of extraordinary or creative abilities. They didn’t fit this piece, but I’ve studied them. Here’s my list of favorites:

• Marie Curie – First person in history to win two Nobel Prizes (only other person to do it was Linus Pauling). She also discovered this little thing called radioactivity, a discovery she died for.
• Ada Lovelace – The first computer programmer in history. She is possibly an example of historic gender bias, as some of the work Babbage is credited with should be attributed to her.
• Georgia Okeefe – The movements of her creative work over a prolific lifetime are comparable to Picasso’s in many ways.
• Jane Austen – In many ways helped define the style and structure of the concept of a modern novel. I’m actually not a fan of her writing, but her impact and influence is worthy of study anyway – especially as her fame and influence was largely posthumous.

Research on how to pitch ideas

This is informal research, but it sure raises some good questions (Why isn’t there a business school or psych dept. doing this sort of thing?).

My friend Konrad over at uber Seattle design studio Artefact put together a mini-study on the effects of different pitches for the same idea. The surprising result? Well I can’t tell you, only that it has something to do with mad-libs.

Go here for the full article (with charts!):How an idea is presented impacts its appeal.

Related post: the ever popular essay: How to pitch an idea. A topic I explored in the University of Washington course I taught on Creative Thinking (Syllabus in PDF).