Archives de catégorie : Feminism

FEMONOMICS de Corinne Low

A radical framework for understanding and improving the lives of women, using a data-driven approach to overcoming the structural, economic, and biological factors that force and constrain women’s choices and limit their potential for wellbeing.

FEMONOMICS
Winning the Bread and Baking It Too: A Data Driven Approach to Happiness in Work, Life, and Home
by Corinne Low
Flatiron, Fall 2025
(via Park & Fine Literary and Media)

Where mostly male behavioral psychologists have previously dominated the categories of happiness and optimization, Corinne, a professor at University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, applies economic principles to uniquely female concerns. Teaching readers how to use concepts like personal utility function (how we individually maximize profit and joy) and constrained optimization (making the best choice within external limits) to think about decisions and tradeoffs like the cost of a biological clock, Corinne will 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 already optimized. It is about moving beyond the work-life binary to help women enjoy a better deal at work, in life, and at home.

Corinne Low is an Associate Professor of business Economics and Public Policy at the Wharton School, specializing in labor and development economics. Her research brings together applied microeconomic theory with lab and field experiments to understand the determinants of who gets how much across gender and age lines. Corinne received her PhD in economics from Columbia University and her undergraduate degree in economics and public policy from Duke University.

THE MOST de Jessica Anthony

A tightly wound, consuming tale for readers of Claire Keegan and Ian McEwan, about a 1950s American housewife who decides to get into the pool in her family’s apartment complex one morning and won’t come out.

THE MOST
by Jessica Anthony
Little, Brown & Co, July 2024
(via Sterling Lord Literistic)

It is an unseasonably warm Sunday in November 1957. Katheen, a college tennis champion turned Delaware housewife, decides not to join her flagrantly handsome life insurance salesman husband, Virgil, or their two young boys, at church. Instead, she takes a dip in the kidney-shaped swimming pool of their apartment complex. And then she won’t come out.

A consuming, single-sitting read set over the course of eight hours, The Most breaches the shimmering surface of a seemingly idyllic mid-century marriage, immersing us in the unspoken truth beneath. As Sputnik 2 orbits the earth carrying Laika, the doomed Soviet dog, Kathleen and Virgil hurtle towards each other until they arrive at a reckoning that will either shatter their marriage, or transform it, at last, into something real.

Jessica Anthony has been a butcher in Alaska, an unlicensed masseuse in Poland, and a secretary in San Francisco. In 2017, while writing Enter the Aardvark, Anthony was working as Bridge Guard, guarding the Maria Valeria Bridge between Sturovo, Slovakia and Esztergom, Hungary. Normally, she lives in Maine and teaches at Bates College.

BEKLAUTE FRAUEN de Leonie Schöler

How women made history – and men took the credit.

BEKLAUTE FRAUEN
(Stolen Fame: Philosophers, Scholars, Pioneers: History’s Invisible Heroines)
by Leonie Schöler
Penguin, February 2024

Muse, secretary, wife: these are some of the labels used to describe the women whose influence on history has been erased. Their achievements have brought honour and fame to the men close to them – such as Karl Marx, Bertolt Brecht and Albert Einstein, who couldn’t have done what they did without their female friends, daughters or lovers – but they themselves remain largely unknown. The list includes scientists like Rosalind Franklin and Lise Meitner, who, unlike their male colleagues, were never celebrated for their discoveries; and authors and artists like Marie Hirsch, Lou Andreas-Salomé and Hedwig Thun, who hid behind male pseudonyms all their lives in order to be taken seriously. In « Stolen Fame », Schöler tells their stories, introducing us to the women who changed human history and showing that there are still issues around participation and visibility. Behind every successful man is a system that empowers him – and that system stands in every woman’s way.

For fans of Invisible Women by Caroline Criado Perez, Unlearn Patriarchy by Lisa Jaspers et al., The Patriarchy of Thing » by Rebekka Endler and Hidden Figures by Margot Lee Shetterly.

Leonie Schöler is a historian, journalist and presenter. Her articles have been published in taz and Zeit Online, and she also works as an editor and online filmmaker (« Jäger und Sammler », « Y-Kollektiv » and « Auf Klo ») for various broadcasters. Her documentary exposing fraud and money laundering at Germany’s largest meat processing company came out in 2021, and she is the author and director of a 2022 online series about the infamous Wannsee Conference (both shown by ZDF). She produces popular history content for TikTok and Instagram and talks to her more than 170k followers about politics past and present. In 2022, she became presenter of ZDF’s Heureka programme (shown on YouTube).

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.