Archives de catégorie : Feminism

FEMONOMICS de Corinne Low

Applying economic principles to the fields of happiness and optimization, Femonomics will help women finally address the challenges they specifically face in order to design lives that go beyond the work-life binary to create true joy, balance, and fulfillment.

FEMONOMICS
Winning the Bread and Baking It Too
by Corinne Low
Flatiron, TBD
(via Park & Fine Literary and Media)

In FEMONOMICS, Corinne Low examines the hidden economic trade-offs and trade-ups women face in balancing career and family, and the research-backed ways they can enjoy a better deal at work, in life, and at home. Where behavioral psychologists (mostly male) have previously dominated the categories of happiness and optimization, Corinne applies economic principles like personal utility function (how we individually maximize profit and joy) and constrained optimization (making the best choice within external limits) to address uniquely female concerns (like the cost of a biological clock) and arm women with the tools they need to ask for more: from their partners, from their bosses, and from the system itself.

Because Corinne researches the key decisions that shape women’s lives, she finds herself most often answering surprisingly everyday (and existential!) questions from students during office hours, colleagues at conferences, and journalists behind the scenes.  Questions like:

  • Should I break up with my boyfriend?
  • What kind of career gives me the life I want?
  • How should I pick a partner?
  • What kind of parent do I want to be?
  • When should I consider freezing my eggs?
  • Why should I fight to get the house in the divorce?

This book is not about optimizing. Women are optimized. It is about designing a life outside of a work-life binary that readers can actually enjoy.

Corinne Low’s course, The Economics of Diversity and Discrimination, is one of the highest rated courses at Wharton. Her research on the economics of gender has been published in top journals such as the American Economic Review, Nature, and Harvard Business Review and featured in popular media including Forbes, Vanity Fair, The LA Times, and NPR. She has spoken at Oxford, the London School of Economics, Stanford, Brookings, Uber, Google, and more.

SEXISM AND SENSIBILITY de Jo-Ann Finkelstein

From Harvard-trained psychologist Jo-Ann Finkelstein, this powerful guide to understanding and dismantling sexism helps parents figure out how to raise girls in a culture that often demeans them.

SEXISM AND SENSIBILITY
Raising Fierce and Empowered Girls in the Modern World
by Jo-Ann Finkelstein
Harmony, September 2024

We live in a world of mixed messages for women: You can be anything you want to be, but don’t expect to be paid equally for it; It’s what is inside that counts, but be sure to wax, bleach, and slim down what’s outside first; You deserve respect and equality, but our laws won’t always protect your rights. Most parents find it easier to tell girls how strong, equal, and powerful they are than to talk about how the world can be particularly difficult or scary for them. But when we don’t address the challenging or disturbing experiences most girls endure, we contribute to the problem.

Jo-Ann Finkelstein has worked with girls for two decades to shake off the toxic messages about beauty, sex, and femininity. She unpacks the universal experiences that girls live with and helps parents safeguard and fine-tune their daughters’ natural “sexism detectors.” SEXISM AND SENSIBILITY is full of concrete solutions for helping girls understand and confront sexism in all its guises.

Jo-Ann Finkelstein, Ph.D., trained as a clinical psychologist at Harvard University and Northwestern University and now maintains a private clinical practice rooted in an understanding of how gender bias, social justice, and mental health intersect. An expert blogger for Psychology Today, her work has been highlighted in The New York Times, The Atlantic, Women’s Health and on HuffPost and CNN. Her writing has appeared in Ms. Magazine, Your Teen Magazine, and Medium, among other publications.

THE GLASS CLIFF de Sophie Williams

THE GLASS CLIFF is a conversation about what happens when women break the rules, and break through The Glass Ceiling.

THE GLASS CLIFF
Why Women in Power are Undermined and How to Fight Back
by Sophie Williams
Macmillan Business, March 2024
(via Randle Editorial & Literary Consultancy)

Have you ever wondered why there are so few success stories of women in business leadership? Or maybe you’ve wondered what life is really like on the other side of The Glass Ceiling? The world of work is supposedly changing, embracing diversity – yet are the opportunities we’re giving to women really equal to those of men?

Drawing on almost 20 years of research from around the world, The Glass Cliff phenomenon – whereby women are often only hired in leadership roles when a business is already underperforming, meaning their chances of success are limited before they ever even start in the role – is well established, but little known. Until now.

This is the story of The Glass Cliff: a story of a structural inequality disguising itself as the personal failures of women. When activist Sophie Williams gave her viral TED talk on the subject, she was subsequently flooded with accounts of confident, accomplished women who had taken what seemed like a dream leadership role only to quickly find themselves in a waking nightmare. Without the language to describe their experiences they had been left blaming themselves. But learning about The Glass Cliff enabled them to reframe and reexamine what they’d gone through.

Sophie Williams is a professional speaker, the author of Millennial Black & Anti-Racist Ally, a TED speaker, the voice behind @OfficialMillennialBlack, and a racial equity consultant. As a speaker, Sophie regularly delivers keynotes, presentations, workshops and training sessions for businesses such as Apple, Amazon, Google, Barclays, the NHS and more. Sophie’s writing has appeared in publications such as The Guardian, Bustle, Glamour, Cosmopolitan, Marie Claire, Refinery29, Elle and Grazia.

FOUR MOTHERS d’Abigail Leonard

In the tradition of Lisa Taddeo’s Three Women and Robert Kolker’s Hidden Valley Road, FOUR MOTHERS follows four women—Anna from Finland, Tsukasa from Japan, Sarah from the U.S., and Chelsea from Kenya—through the first year of motherhood.

FOUR MOTHERS
by Abigail Leonard
Algonquin, Fall 2025)
(via The Friedrich Agency)

Abigail blends reporting, research, and history to create an international portrait of new motherhood and the policies that scaffold this transitional phase of life. As debates surrounding paid leave, universal daycare, and national healthcare rage on across different corners of the globe, FOUR MOTHERS is an intimate narrative of what those policies mean in the everyday lives of four women—and a compelling argument for the necessity and urgency of supporting parents.

Abigail Leonard is an award-winning international reporter and news producer. Her work has appeared in NPR, Time Magazine, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Newsweek, and Vox. She has written and produced long-form news documentaries for PBS, ABC and Al Jazeera America. Stories she reported have earned an Emmy Award, an Overseas Press Club Award, an Association of Health Care Journalists Award, a National Headliner Award, and a James Beard Foundation Media Award Nomination.

RAPE GIRL de Jamie Hood

A necessarily illuminating text, imagining stranger, more radical models of storytelling. Combining the hybridity of Camen Maria Machado’s In the Dream House with the intensity of Maggie Nelson’s The Art of Cruelty, RAPE GIRL promises to do for sexual violence what Citizen did for conversations around race, and become part of a new wave of cultural resistance.

RAPE GIRL:
A Study in Nine Parts
by Jamie Hood
Pantheon/Random House, Spring 2024
(via Frances Goldin Literary)

In many ways, RAPE GIRL: A STUDY IN NINE PARTS is the book that essayist, critic, and poet Jamie Hood has been writing her entire life. In the thirty years since her first sexual assault (age six, by the neighbor), it has taken many forms: a chronological, straight memoir of violence; a book-length poem; a manifesto; a novel. In the wake of each subsequent attack (twice as a teenager, several times in graduate school, most recently at a Brooklyn bar), and resultant attempt to narrativize the violence, what became clear was that no single genre was able to capture the entirety of what she was trying to say.
Trauma disorients the very possibility of straightforward narrative, so then why do we expect our tellings of it to be linear and easily digestible? RAPE GIRL asks: what is rape at its core? And beyond: how would an account of rape that acknowledges and incorporates the truth of trauma as an experience shift the conversation?
Told in nine parts—media historical, political, poetic, autofictional, literary critical, and memoiristic—RAPE GIRL reckons with the confessional imperative of survivors and the role of rape narratives in our collective consciousness. Weaving between genres and throughout history, Hood consults Artemesia Gentileschi and other foremothers in revenge and witness, documents a month of walking the exact route that she took to escape an assailant, tangles with the specter of Dick Wolf and Law & Order, reflects on her own coping mechanisms and childhood in Virginia, probes the specific silence around trans women’s experience of rape, and interrogates what it means to enter a post-#MeToo era of backlash in 2022.

Jamie Hood is a critic, memoirist, and poet, and the author of how to be a good girl (Grieveland 2020). Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Baffler, The Nation, Los Angeles Review of Books, The New Inquiry, Observer, The Drift, SSENSE, Bookforum, Vogue, and elsewhere. She lives in Brooklyn.