Comment Re:Males want to be Alpha Males. (Score 1) 823
I agree with much of your comment, but I am a mite frustrated with the assumed gender differences. Granted, there are populations of male nerds who have less than stellar reputations for good reason, but nerd arrogance isn't an exclusively male tendency. I've seen it in women, and as a female nerd I hereby assert and confess that I had more than my share of nerd arrogance once upon a time, especially as a computer science undergraduate. Even now I think back on the abusive ways I communicated and the walls I inadvertently put up that blocked genuine collaboration and collegiality, and I wince. 12 years later, I've worked long and hard on cultivating compassion and humility in my personality and have seen incalculably valuable return on that investment.
There may well be a positive correlation between nerd arrogance and what emerges as "male" from socialized (and unfortunately binary) gender differences, but in my opinion there is utterly insufficient data to confirm that statistically, so I'd prefer to stick with the "attitude of arrogance and superiority among nerds" as the question at hand instead of speculating about the gender correlation. In fact, your own anecdote undercuts your speculation by explicitly attributing the difference between computer science and jazz to the nature of the field instead of the gender ratio:
Jazz Majors were predominantly male too. However, due to the nature of Jazz where the band works as a team, there is less arrogance
The reason I say that there is insufficient data to confidently correlate gender and nerd arrogance is that there are simply too few women in the field, and given the nature of the field, those women who do enter it have already gone through an element of pre-selection. (Note: so have the men in the field.) If the population were considerably more diverse and if the field didn't have an earned reputation as having gender accessibility issues, then I would consider speculating about gender. Until then, it makes more sense to leave it to personality and socialized behaviour.
What do you think?