A sharp indictment of male privilege and an urgent appeal for a more inclusive practice of science.
An insider’s portrayal of the many reasons why women are underrepresented in science.
Early in the book, Donald, emeritus professor of experimental physics and former Gender Equality Champion at the University of Cambridge, poses a wonderfully pointed question: “Can you think of a female scientist?” Many people can name only one: Marie Curie. This collective ignorance illustrates the numerous factors that discourage girls from pursuing careers in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. Biosciences aside, women are “typically well below 50%” in the STEM disciplines. Even when they earn doctorates, they are less likely than men to continue or rise to senior positions in labs or at universities. “It isn’t ability that’s stopping them,” dampening their aspirations, and wasting their talents. Donald acknowledges some progress while noting the persistence of cultural attitudes that assume math is too difficult for girls, exclude stories of accomplished women scientists in textbooks and the mass media, and deny girls the toys that encourage scientific curiosity. In their careers, women encounter workplace harassment and find their ideas coopted by men. Support for having a family while staying sufficiently engaged in the field, moreover, is still inadequate. As the author points out, “domesticity remains widely seen as the woman’s preserve more than the man’s.” Donald dreams of a field that offers “opportunity for everybody to make career choices that are best for them, not what other people’s expectations force upon them.” Providing affordable child care, ensuring that women (and other minorities) are represented on hiring committees, and making career ladders more manageable will benefit women and enable a much-needed diversity of perspectives. Being a scientist also involves personal traits such as curiosity, confidence, and persistence. However, these traits are often defeated by institutional biases that thwart even the most dedicated girls and women.
A sharp indictment of male privilege and an urgent appeal for a more inclusive practice of science.Pub Date: May 11, 2023
ISBN: 9780192893406
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 13, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2023
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change.
Artist and activist Vaid-Menon demonstrates how the normativity of the gender binary represses creativity and inflicts physical and emotional violence.
The author, whose parents emigrated from India, writes about how enforcement of the gender binary begins before birth and affects people in all stages of life, with people of color being especially vulnerable due to Western conceptions of gender as binary. Gender assignments create a narrative for how a person should behave, what they are allowed to like or wear, and how they express themself. Punishment of nonconformity leads to an inseparable link between gender and shame. Vaid-Menon challenges familiar arguments against gender nonconformity, breaking them down into four categories—dismissal, inconvenience, biology, and the slippery slope (fear of the consequences of acceptance). Headers in bold font create an accessible navigation experience from one analysis to the next. The prose maintains a conversational tone that feels as intimate and vulnerable as talking with a best friend. At the same time, the author's turns of phrase in moments of deep insight ring with precision and poetry. In one reflection, they write, “the most lethal part of the human body is not the fist; it is the eye. What people see and how people see it has everything to do with power.” While this short essay speaks honestly of pain and injustice, it concludes with encouragement and an invitation into a future that celebrates transformation.
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change. (writing prompt) (Nonfiction. 14-adult)Pub Date: June 2, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-09465-5
Page Count: 64
Publisher: Penguin Workshop
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
A clearly delineated guide to finally eradicate poverty in America.
A thoughtful program for eradicating poverty from the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Evicted.
“America’s poverty is not for lack of resources,” writes Desmond. “We lack something else.” That something else is compassion, in part, but it’s also the lack of a social system that insists that everyone pull their weight—and that includes the corporations and wealthy individuals who, the IRS estimates, get away without paying upward of $1 trillion per year. Desmond, who grew up in modest circumstances and suffered poverty in young adulthood, points to the deleterious effects of being poor—among countless others, the precarity of health care and housing (with no meaningful controls on rent), lack of transportation, the constant threat of losing one’s job due to illness, and the need to care for dependent children. It does not help, Desmond adds, that so few working people are represented by unions or that Black Americans, even those who have followed the “three rules” (graduate from high school, get a full-time job, wait until marriage to have children), are far likelier to be poor than their White compatriots. Furthermore, so many full-time jobs are being recast as contracted, fire-at-will gigs, “not a break from the norm as much as an extension of it, a continuation of corporations finding new ways to limit their obligations to workers.” By Desmond’s reckoning, besides amending these conditions, it would not take a miracle to eliminate poverty: about $177 billion, which would help end hunger and homelessness and “make immense headway in driving down the many agonizing correlates of poverty, like violence, sickness, and despair.” These are matters requiring systemic reform, which will in turn require Americans to elect officials who will enact that reform. And all of us, the author urges, must become “poverty abolitionists…refusing to live as unwitting enemies of the poor.” Fortune 500 CEOs won’t like Desmond’s message for rewriting the social contract—which is precisely the point.
A clearly delineated guide to finally eradicate poverty in America.Pub Date: March 21, 2023
ISBN: 9780593239919
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 30, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2023
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