American men are slipping. They’re a minority group at college compared to women, and their wages are slipping compared to other groups. So why did The Atlantic choose to run a really irritating think piece: “Why is Silicon Valley So Awful to Women?”

I am trying, honestly, to figure out why essays like this make me so mad.

Modern Privileged Feminists Deny Differences Between Men and Women

I know women can be and are brilliant engineers and computer scientists. As a Yale grad I know many such women. I wish these talented, hard working women all the success in the world. I know very well that some men use power to get sex. That is pretty irritating for the average working woman.

I have a family member who is studying to be an engineer. Is her sex going to handicap her? I suspect it’s going to give her a leg up. What the Atlantic writers who fear for her future are really asking is: Will she be diverted from focusing relentlessly on achieving the very highest career level? She loves spending time with her family, and helping disadvantaged children. More women than men get sidetracked from climbing to the top by loves like that. Is that a bad thing?

Remaining fiercely devoted to sex-blindness hurts women, men and children alike.

Women who want to combine love of career and family face special stresses. I know that. Likewise, men who put career success before family make bad husbands and fathers. But men know very few women are willing to support and love them while they become house dads or work failures. So the family and career stresses of men and women differ. That’s life. That’s reality. That’s the one thing privileged women seem afraid to face: Sex difference is real and it matters.

Women need to accommodate and help one another. That’s why I get really mad when the most privileged women in America ignore these human realities. Instead, they swim in self-important blindness to sex differences. As a result, they— at least the women represented by those who love this kind of Atlantic essay — have a hard time offering useful advice to most women, or helping redress the really deep social ills we face.

Remaining fiercely devoted to sex-blindness hurts women, men and children alike.

Women Criticizing Women’s Choices

Now I am of course back in La La Land: One of the things that makes me mad is the dogma that the goal of work is financial success über alles. I get flashbacks to a 1980s Manhattan dinner party.

One young feminist career woman learned that I was a young, unwed professional woman raising a son. She had the audacity to tell me how to do that. My first duty, she said, was to shape my son as a feminist. That way he could further some unknown girls’ career prospects.

My son was more important to me than my career success. And yet here this young stranger was dissing my choices to my face.

Infuriating. I mean here I was sacrificing my own career to raise my son as well as I could. I was working part-time, taking jobs with flexibility, and so on. My son was more important to me than my career success — obviously. And yet here this young stranger was dissing me and my choices to my face. Even worse, she was devaluing my son to serve some utilitarian purposes for ideology’s sake. And she was proffering me both insults so blithely, so cluelessly.

A Real Problem: America’s Men

If women in Silicon Valley are being treated badly, here’s a plan: They could take their Stanford and MIT degrees, their knowledge and know-how, their money (and their parents’ money) and start their own Silicon Valley firms. They could make a Galt’s Gulch paradise for women inventors and engineers. It might actually be a better pathway to economic growth and personal success. It sure beats complaining that an enormously inventive and successful slice of the economy created by men is evil because, well, it’s still kind of male.

Women now control a huge portion of human capital and financial capital. Women’s access to capital might not be exactly equal to men’s, but was Silicon Valley’s access equal to General Motors when it started? The problems of women with Ivy League degrees are good problems to have. They’re probably not our nation’s first priorities.

Meanwhile there’s a far greater problem for most women, for the economy, and for the country: Our fathers, brothers, and sons are doing badly. Their wages aren’t growing and they’re not finishing college. Many are dying of despair.

What is Silicon Valley’s solution for that? Driverless cars are probably not going to help.