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A review by tanja_alina_berg
Mother of Invention: How Good Ideas Get Ignored in an Economy Built for Men by Katrine Marçal
4.0
This book explores how good ideas get ignored because anything feminine is intrinsically bad, and woman is considered "other". The standard against which everything must be measured is a man (though forbid the thought that a woman would act as a man, that is unseemly). That is why putting wheels on suitcases took thousands of years after the wheel was invented. Carrying was a man's job.
When I moved to Germany in 2001, that was with a suitcase without wheels. That same fall, I had been traveling too soon after an emergency operation that saved my 23-year old self, and I remember that even carrying my little carry-on bag was heavy. From 2002, it was wheels and I have not for a single second missed my wheel-less suitcases. But I had to carry my luggage, with a fresh 15 cm scar on my stomach, because wheels on a suitcase was unmanly and the invention came super late and distributed whole-sale to all suitcases only at the end of the 1990's.
Women were the original computers. In low-paid jobs, they made calculations. The original programmer was a woman. It was only in the 1980's that programming went from a low-paid female type of job to the nerdy-man, high paid profession it remains today. A secretary was in the beginning a well-paid job for a man, and then that shape-shifted into a lowly female kind of job. I am wondering what the status of doctors, lawyers and psychologist will become, now that the these study-lines are long since female-dominated (at least here in the Nordic countries).
The original entrepreneur, according to common lore, was a man. It was the spear, the ax and other tools for destruction that we consider huge improvements to the human state. Cooking, pottery, bags to carry children and other wares in - not so much, although that would have made a vast improvement and were more likely invented by women.
We need the entire spectrum of ideas, and that not half the population is being consistently undermined. That which is considered feminine is not inherently bad, or simple. What is now considered low-paid female job, such as cleaners and care-workers - these are likely the last jobs that will be replaced by robots. The inherent complexity, along with human interaction, of these tasks cannot be so easily replaced. Financial analysts though, will likely be outpaced by algorithms before this decade is out. Just as Kasparov lost in chess to a computer. It it's logical and the rules are consistent, the machines wins. Our world is for most part, much more intricate than this.
When I moved to Germany in 2001, that was with a suitcase without wheels. That same fall, I had been traveling too soon after an emergency operation that saved my 23-year old self, and I remember that even carrying my little carry-on bag was heavy. From 2002, it was wheels and I have not for a single second missed my wheel-less suitcases. But I had to carry my luggage, with a fresh 15 cm scar on my stomach, because wheels on a suitcase was unmanly and the invention came super late and distributed whole-sale to all suitcases only at the end of the 1990's.
Women were the original computers. In low-paid jobs, they made calculations. The original programmer was a woman. It was only in the 1980's that programming went from a low-paid female type of job to the nerdy-man, high paid profession it remains today. A secretary was in the beginning a well-paid job for a man, and then that shape-shifted into a lowly female kind of job. I am wondering what the status of doctors, lawyers and psychologist will become, now that the these study-lines are long since female-dominated (at least here in the Nordic countries).
The original entrepreneur, according to common lore, was a man. It was the spear, the ax and other tools for destruction that we consider huge improvements to the human state. Cooking, pottery, bags to carry children and other wares in - not so much, although that would have made a vast improvement and were more likely invented by women.
We need the entire spectrum of ideas, and that not half the population is being consistently undermined. That which is considered feminine is not inherently bad, or simple. What is now considered low-paid female job, such as cleaners and care-workers - these are likely the last jobs that will be replaced by robots. The inherent complexity, along with human interaction, of these tasks cannot be so easily replaced. Financial analysts though, will likely be outpaced by algorithms before this decade is out. Just as Kasparov lost in chess to a computer. It it's logical and the rules are consistent, the machines wins. Our world is for most part, much more intricate than this.