What if Bill Gates Had Been Born A Poor Black Girl?

What if Bill Gates Had Been Born A Poor Black Girl?

"The lives of outliers--those people whose achievements fall outside normal experience--follow a peculiar and unexpected logic, and in making that logic plain Gladwell presents a fascinating and provocative blueprint for making the most of human potential."

This excerpt is from the inside cover of Malcolm Gladwell's book the Outliers: The Story of Success. When I originally read this passage, I naively assumed that "those people" and "human potential" also referred to women. Unfortunately, as I later discovered, the only woman whose success was discussed in any detail was the author's mother. But not even she was an outlier. From a parenting perspective this book has its merits, but unfortunately, the message is just more exclusion dressed up as inclusion, a "blueprint" that applies to a select few. And sorry, I can't allow someone else to frame what success is!

Let's start by looking at a stat courtesy of Reuters posted on International Women's Day:

Women make up less than 1% of department heads, editors, media owners but a third of working journalists

The message is pretty clear here. If you are a woman, and you want to work in media, there's opportunity for you as a reporter, but if you want to be, say, an editor, things aren't looking too promising! And heaven forbid you should want to be a media owner. But just a second...isn't Oprah Winfrey a media mogul? Wow, she must be that less than one percent! And she's a woman of color too! Now how many women of color are media owners? I have a feeling that it is less than 1%, but sorry I couldn't find a statistic to support that. Now, doesn't her achievement fall outside normal experience? Well, not if we compare her with the other 99% of men who are media owners.

New Category: The Super Outlier

My point is that success should not be a measure of where you are now, but rather how far you've come. For Oprah to become a media mogul, she had to overcome poverty, and racial and gender barriers, which to the vast majority of us are insurmountable. And if we compare Oprah with one of Mr. Gladwell's outliers, Bill Gates, we will see just how far Oprah has come. Bill Gates is white, born into a wealthy family, went to a private school with a computer in the 1960s, had access to a computer outside of school, dropped out of Harvard, started a software company and today is worth $40 billion. Oprah is black, was born into poverty, a child of a single mother and a victim of sexual abuse, went to Tennessee State University, made her way into television, got her own award-winning syndicated talk show that is seen around the world, owns a network, and she is worth $2.7 billion.

I'm not saying that Mr. Gates is not an outlier, but in his case, there is undeniably some white privilege at play. In other words, he has come a long way, but how many opportunities would he have encountered if he had been born a poor black girl? That is why I believe that if Mr. Gates is an outlier, then Oprah Winfrey is a super outlier.

But I still wonder why, Mr. Gladwell, you did not feature Oprah or another woman who has successfully made her way into a male-dominated field? Was it because it didn't support your argument or because it would reveal to men that their success is due to their unwillingness to let anyone else join the club?

Click here for another review of Outliers that appeared in the Telegraph (UK).

Click here to see what another blogger has to say about Outliers. HL

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Accumulative Advantage: Something to Consider For Your Children

Accumulative Advantage: Something to Consider For Your Children

When my daughter started school I was concerned about her being too "young." Her birthday is September 25, and the cut-off date to start kindergarten was October 1. Her teacher assured me after the first month that she was ready.

However, first grade was a different story, as it is for many children. My daughter found it difficult to get into the routine of doing homework. I was also surprised that she showed so little interest in learning to read, as both my husband and I are avid readers. At the first parent-teacher meeting, her teacher assured me that my daughter was doing fine and that reading required developing a lot of skills simultaneously. Still I wondered about the amount of resistance I was encountering. She was learning, but there seemed to be little motivation.

One day as I was walking back from my daughter's school with another mother, Mary, I asked her how her daughter was managing with reading. Her daughter, who is in the same grade as my daughter, had no difficulties with reading, or with doing her homework. Out of curiosity, I asked her when her daughter was born and discovered that her birthday was in January. In other words, although our kids were in the same grade, Mary's daughter was nearly 10 months older than mine.

It was around this time that I picked up Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers: the Story of Success. Although a very insightful book, I found little to allay my fears about having enrolled my daughter in school before I was convinced she was ready. In his book, Gladwell looks into the different factors that influence success and make the outlier, or someone who does things out of the ordinary.

In the first chapter, the author looks at successful hockey players and the months in which they are born. Given that the cut-off date for hockey registration in Canada is January 1, it was not surprising that young boys born in January, the oldest, would be the biggest and have slightly more skill than boys born later in the year in the same age group. (Sorry, Mr. Gladwell did not mention girl hockey players in his book, as he should have.) He looked at semi-professional hockey players and found that a high percentage of team members were born in the first three months of the year, a pattern which was repeated in other countries.

Now, you might be asking yourself how could being born in the first three months of the year make that much of a difference? Gladwell claims that success is what sociologists dub the "accumulative advantage," and he uses the example of the successful hockey player to illustrate.

The professional hockey player starts out a little bit better than his peers, and that little difference leads to an opportunity that makes that difference a bit bigger, and that edge in turn leads to another opportunity, which makes the initial difference bigger still- and on and on until the hockey player is a genuine outlier.

In other words, the small initial edge, in terms of age, size and skill, leads to more opportunity or more hockey games and better coaches, and the individual gets better and better.

I think you can see where I'm going with this. I immediately felt that I was wrong to have enrolled my daughter in school when I wasn't convinced she was ready. Admittedly, there isn't much I can do now. She has her friends and seems very happy where she is. I guess all I can do as a parent is be on the look-out for those opportunities that will help her along the way.



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