But the point people are saying — and we are people with experience — is that they aren’t, that there are differences that are far more than a little asterisk with “for the ladies, it’s a little teeny bit different” printed at the bottom of the page.

From my own life and the lives of the other women I know — highly successful academic officials, doctorates, and lawyers — the game is radically different for us, and books like these that pretend it isn’t don’t do us much good at all.

A book that can’t be applied even to the majority of its intended audience isn’t a very good book, and a writer who can’t write to the situation of over half of his intended readership isn’t a good writer. If it’s a book about maximizing success strategies for men, it should be labeled as such.

Most people would look at a step by step program as something that goes “deeper” than simply providing well-known information couched in slightly different terms with different stories to illustrate that information, not the other way around.

I would also like to see a book like this that does focus on gender stuff; I’ve found that the “spunky, plucky genius” meme that these books promote simply doesn’t work for women. It gets met with more hostility, outright sabotage, or clumsy passes than respect for gutsiness or admiration for pluck.

As a result, I’ve found that, as with a lot of women, the only things I can become truly great at are things I do entirely myself, which is very tough for an extrovert like myself — and in a world where collaboration is increasingly important, it can be crippling.

@Jeanne Li — I don’t know that he doesn’t know it exists, but if you judged by the content of the book alone, he doesn’t seem to acknowledge it or the fact that women’s stories may be very different than the men he highlights throughout the book.