Julia Cheiffetz, at HarperStudio, weighs in on an old hot button topic here at Bookninja.

An article in O Magazine points out that Malcolm ‘The Tipping Point‘ Gladwell’s new book Outliers, about extraordinary achievers, does not include a single woman. Cheiffetz speculates why, wondering if the omission of women in Outliers says more about the nature of “big think” books than it does about Mr.Gladwell:

It is hard to know whether women are better at telling stories than propagating ideas (I’m thinking of Susan Orlean, Mary Roach, Karen Abbott), or whether the intellectual audacity required to sell our hypotheses about the world simply isn’t in our genetic makeup. But until we get in the ring and start claiming our own big ideas in book form, I suppose we shouldn’t be surprised if current discourse leaves us on the sidelines. Still, Malcolm Gladwell is one of the most influential public intellectuals of our time and it’s a shame he didn’t use his platform to celebrate a few women outliers.

Considering Cheiffetz’s thesis about “big think” books, Galley Cat chimes in:

We’re not entirely convinced—right off the top of our head, we thought of Susan Faludi and Naomi Klein in the “explain-it-all” category—but we did find Cheiffetz’s distinction between “storytellers” and “big thinkers,” and the suggestion that these two types of writing might play out along gender lines at least as far as what sells, intriguing.

Here at Bookninja, I have developed an alternative theory about how we roll in Canada. Developing this theory involved taking my own bias in hand, crafting a thesis to suit and proving it by plucking a few favourite examples, all while ignoring any evidence that doesn’t fit.

This is it: Canadian “big think” books are written by women – Noami Klein, Jane Jacobs, Margaret Atwood, Margaret Visser…