[lindseybieda]

I'm not sure why people still take Penelope Trunk seriously.

http://blog.penelopetrunk.com/2011/08/16/blueprint-for-a-wom...

This should be enough to convince you that she is full of shit. She doesn't practice what she preaches and holds very strongly to the status quo.

She actively discourages women from entering the startup world, so no wonder she is annoyed that some people are trying to encourage women.

http://blog.penelopetrunk.com/2011/03/05/the-workplace-shoul...

She regards inequality and unbalance as a non-problem and generalizes that all women are the same.

http://venturebeat.com/2011/11/29/woman-problem-what-woman-p...

http://baileybear.hubpages.com/hub/Penelope-Trunk-Brazen-Car...

Listening to anything this woman says seems to do more harm than good.

[yummyfajitas]

She doesn't practice what she preaches...

Pretty much anyone who says "don't make the same mistakes I made" doesn't practice what they preach.

She actively discourages women from entering the startup world...

Your link does not support your claim. If you disagree, please quote some text from your link where she discourages women from entering the startup world.

[roguecoder]

She's a sociopath who seems pathologically opposed to objecting to any aspect of culture, or asking men to do anything. Given that the behaviors she is working around actively hurt men, there are responses other than "you should stay at home with your kids while pretending to work until your company fires you" that would be win-wins. The problems she sees can not be solved by any change in individual women's behavior; that way lies madness. It is going to require a systematic cultural change in the behavior, assumptions and attitudes of people with institutional power, most of them men. The "you must homeschool" is a good example of this: improving public schools is a valid alternative that would help everyone, not just children of women like her.

The life that is left for men in her world sounds incredibly un-appealing. I am a sperm donor, a potential source of income as I pay her to produce children for me, or on the non-romantic side, I'm someone to trick into doing most of the work in a start up while she takes credit. Regardless, I am expected to work jobs that consume my entire life, prevent me from having a relationship with my children and my wife's goal is not to have an equal or communicative relationship with me: she's just trying to keep me happy so we'll both be in our kids lives. That makes it my responsibility to be happy, and if I'm not it is a world-ending failure on my part. Have we seen Mad Men? The lesson from that show for me was "Holy Crap, that sucked!"

Humans are social creatures; any effective change will not be the product of individual behavior in isolation from all others. She takes as given: "nothing can change except my behavior" and then optimized under a set of terrible circumstances. Unfortunately her optimizations make her life better at the cost of making other people's lives worse.

[RobAtticus]

In your first link, and also the link submitted, she states that women do better than men in school. I don't see where she gets this information (she doesn't cite any study that I can find), and I'm curious about the claim. Is it simply that men have a wider range of grades in school so there are many more in the failing range that brings down the average, whereas women have a smaller range with fewer women failing so the average is higher? Is it even measured in terms of grades? I only wonder because in my experience, my peers who did the best in school were mostly male (however, the ones doing the worst were also mostly male). Then again, maybe my peer group is just an exception to the norm?

[roguecoder]

It depends on which society you are in; the more gender-equal, the better girls perform in school. There are places where they do slightly outperform boys overall, including in many colleges. The broader trend is that girls' test scores have been improving much faster than boys have over the past 40 years. It isn't that boys are performing any worse than they were before, or are being ill-served by school, it's just that girls have overtaken them. This change mostly came when standardized testing came about and grades were no longer subjective: with clear goals and unambiguous feedback, girls had new opportunities to excel. Boys, on the other hand, aren't socially rewarded for working hard on things they aren't good at, for empathizing and thus developing social intelligence (which is enormously valuable in school and particularly test performance) and weren't driven by the same fear of failure: worst that happens to me is I end up in my parents basement failing to pay child support.

(Your proto-bell-curve explanation has been mostly dismissed at this point, just like all the rest of the "variation" arguments: variation ends up being highly influenced by social and cultural factors. The variation in American boy's performance in school, for example, is partially a product of how shittily our schools serve poor African-American boys.)

[usaar333]

I read the first link with the assumption of a satirical undertone. I really hope it's not just my brain.