Are male and female music critics really that different?

I found this quote from music critic Chuck Eddy on my Tumblr dash the other day:

Ellen Willis

"A lot of the women writers I published in the Voice talked about music in the context of their lives in a way that I’m not very good at. I tend to talk about music in terms of my record collection. Obviously, it’s completely a generality. I think that most of the women I quote in my articles talk about music in the course of their lives in a way men don’t." (source)

While I think this is a bit reductive, I wouldn't say it's entirely false, but not because I think women's writing is inherently different from men's. Women's writing (like women's voices -- see below) is expected to be more personal, while men's is allowed to be colder, more clinical, less about their own lives. And at the same time, there are quite a few male critics who really excel at writing about music "in the context of their own lives." (Rolling Stone's Rob Sheffield comes to mind, and does Jim Walsh, who edited a fan history of The Replacements.)

What I really think, though, is that we're more trained to see it in women's writing, and that there are so few well-known female music critics, the sample from which he drew was probably not very large. Another rarely point that's rarely touched upon is that women don't have that built in "music nerd" culture that men do, and often come to music as fans first. There is nothing wrong with this, but being a fan -- or writing as a fan -- is looked at with some disdain. I don't think that what he's saying here, but I can't help but bristle a little when women are pointed out as "different" in a field that's largely male-dominated.