Rebecca Solnit, widely recognized as one of the best non-fiction writers working today, describes a phenomenon — the pervasiveness of arrogant yet clueless blowhards — through the prism of gender. The essay is entertaining and illuminating. Men are often on the receiving end of the particular brand of arrogant cluelessness she describes, as she acknowledges in the essay:

Yes, guys like this pick on other men’s books too, and people of both genders pop up at events to hold forth on irrelevant things and conspiracy theories, but the out-and-out confrontational confidence of the totally ignorant is, in my experience, gendered. Men explain things to me, and other women, whether or not they know what they’re talking about. Some men.

I’m confident that the vast majority of arrogant yet clueless blowhards are men, and that perceived status hierarchies play a role, e.g., men who perceive women as inferior are more likely to engage in the conversational practices she describes. There are, of course, other distinctions, e.g., age, race, wealth, discipline, situatedness (is the blowhard an insider and you’re an outsider?), and even physical size that can also play a role.

As you can imagine, the “out-and-out confrontational confidence of the totally ignorant” is extremely common among opinion journalists, if not paradigmatic.