An illuminating study of how men look at workplace gender equity.
Reed considers the median male executive in this nonfiction study of workplace equity.
What’s standing in the way of gender equity in the workplace? The simple answer is: men. Men hold three out of every four senior executive positions in America, and if they’re unwilling to make an effort to promote gender equity in the workplace, it isn’t likely to get done. It’s worth exploring, then, just what men think about gender equity. “#MeToo elevated stories predominantly about men who took advantage of situations or offended women but not conversations with men about gender-related issues in the workplace and their viewpoints on change for good,” writes the author. Reed set out to have these conversations by interviewing men in corporate leadership roles, attempting to discover what they actually think about gender in the workplace. Perhaps unsurprisingly, most of the men she spoke with sat somewhere in the mushy middle, “far from the extremes of either outwardly, vocally championing women or treating women like sex objects in the office.” This book probes the fine points of the views of these men with the goal of better understanding how true gender equity can be achieved. Reed mixes her interviews (which are anonymized through the use of pseudonyms) with research on the ways opinions get shaped and a selection of mediation strategies. Her prose is direct and nonjudgmental, as here, when she presents the views of a man she calls Bob: “While Bob supports gender equality, he won’t treat men and women in a similar way regarding work-social events like meeting over drinks or dinner. He perceives there is a potential risk of a false accusation, especially when, in a one-on-one setting, it would be his word against hers.” The evidence the author collates may not be surprising in the broad strokes, but the nuances she gleans contain a great deal of compelling information. The book makes for a fascinating window into the mind of the contemporary male executive in the post-#MeToo era.
An illuminating study of how men look at workplace gender equity.Pub Date: Aug. 11, 2023
ISBN: 9798987586600
Page Count: 312
Publisher: Pure Ink Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 8, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
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