Here are 100 books that Why So Slow? fans have personally recommended if you like
Why So Slow?.
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I started keeping a journal when I was fifteen. Ten years later, I had the raw material for Fugue, a portrait of the artist as a young woman (I had read Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man) that ends in celebration, rather than suicide (I had also recently read Plath's The Belljar). It did not get published. Thirty years later, I had so little, far too little, to celebrate. The portrait had become one of relentless frustration and persistent failure, despite my continued effort ... so much effort ... And so I wrote This is what happens, dedicating it to all the passionate, hard-working, competent women — it's not you.
Although this novel focuses on the world of investment banking, I list it here because it shows the difference between being a female working in finance and being a male working in finance; like This is what happens, it shows the impact of sexism on one woman's professional life, her dream, her ambition, her failure to achieve the former despite the latter.
I read it quite a while ago but was reminded of it while reading recently about the recent Martin/Nicole thing (wherein they switched email addresses, so Martin experienced what it was like to be Nicole for a couple of weeks) ("Folks, it sucked" was his summary).
"A job at Cray McKinley is whatever you make of it. For the real high flyers, there's no limit to what you can achieve."
Abby is a high flyer. But she's not your average banker. Driven by something other than money and status, she has her own reasons for climbing the ladder.
And so does Mike. An ambitious young graduate with an equally impressive CV, Mike is in it for the six-figure salaries and fast cars. He's got the skills, the grades and the swagger to make it all the way to the top.
I grew up rebelling against the roles I was expected to take on as a girl. I grew up not knowing that girls could fall in love with girls. I grew up with a strong sense of injustice and a desire to do something about it. The books on my list all feature strong female protagonists experiencing and/or taking on injustices of one kind or another. They are written by interesting women who write brilliantly. Some of the books are dear to me because nature provides comfort and strength beneath the chaos of human chatter, as it does for me.
The first time I tried to read this book, I had to put it down. I like grammar, and this book is having none of it. Then I tried again a few weeks later because everyone said I should. Once I got used to it, I came to appreciate this stream-of-consciousness story filled with artists, poets, writers, lesbians, love triangles, and adventures, and, at its heart, unlikely female friendships between Black women living mostly in London, with plot twists and turns deepening their interconnectedness in often astonishing ways.
The writing is so vivid that it made me feel as if I’d watched a film rather than read a book. A bright, multi-colored, hilarious, emotionally deep, socially aware, politically progressive, moving, and fast-paced film.
“A must-read about modern Britain and womanhood . . . An impressive, fierce novel about the lives of black British families, their struggles, pains, laughter, longings and loves . . . Her style is passionate, razor-sharp, brimming with energy and humor. There is never a single moment of dullness in this book and the pace does not allow you to turn away from its momentum.” —Booker Prize Judges
Bernardine Evaristo is the winner of the 2019 Booker Prize and the first black woman to receive this highest literary honor in the English language.…
As a veteran business and finance journalist, I’ve always been amazed at the huge gender gap that still exists in so many parts of the economy and society despite all the strides we’ve ostensibly made. When I became a mother, it became even clearer to me that gender norms are still so entrenched in culture and still have a huge bearing on women’s economic and professional lives. I’ve written about this topic for a whole host of publications, from the BBC to The Washington Post. I have an MBA from Columbia Business School and am an associate Instructor in the Strategic Communications program at Columbia’s School of Professional Studies.
I read this book in a single day and was captivated by the way in which Sieghart combined narrative storytelling with deep-rooted research and analysis.
To me, the book makes a crystal-clear case that many of the gender gaps we contend with today actually begin with the authority gap: the fact that women are trusted less than men and are considered less credible.
Sieghart does a fantastic job of making complex research accessible and digestible.
Every woman has a story of being underestimated, ignored, challenged, or patronized in the workplace. Maybe she tried to speak up in a meeting, only to be talked over by male colleagues. Or a client addressed her male subordinate instead of her. These stories remain true even for women at the top of their fields; in the U.S. Supreme Court, for example, female justices are interrupted four times more often than their male colleagues-and 96 percent of the time by men. Despite the progress we've made toward equality, we still fail, more often than we might realize, to take women…
I started keeping a journal when I was fifteen. Ten years later, I had the raw material for Fugue, a portrait of the artist as a young woman (I had read Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man) that ends in celebration, rather than suicide (I had also recently read Plath's The Belljar). It did not get published. Thirty years later, I had so little, far too little, to celebrate. The portrait had become one of relentless frustration and persistent failure, despite my continued effort ... so much effort ... And so I wrote This is what happens, dedicating it to all the passionate, hard-working, competent women — it's not you.
Feminist theorist Dale Spender wrote, in Women of Ideas and What Men Have Done to Them, “We need to know how women disappear….” Although she spoke of women who disappear from the historical record, all too many women seem to disappear from any sort of public life as soon as they leave high school: so many shine there, but once they graduate, they become invisible. What happens?
Marriage and kids is an inadequate answer because married-with-kids straight-A boys are visible. Everywhere. Even the straight-B boys are out there. So what happens?
Look around us—DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) is under attack. From challenges to the Voting Rights Act and bans on books to the suppression of history and education, protections and rights are being rolled back. We must all recognize that systemic racism, patriarchy, homophobia, and other forms of discrimination harm not only the oppressed but also those who ostensibly benefit from these structures. It is time to move beyond passive or performative allyship and become proactive Disruptors—individuals willing to stand up and use their voices to advocate for equity and mutual respect.
I am deeply connected with this essay. It filled me with joy that someone understood my experiences. How sexual politics permeates a lot of the daily interactions we experience, and just what it means to be a woman.
It had me reexamine my ideas of womanhood and my engagement with Patriarchy. This elegant, eloquent book is an empowering call to tear down gender hierarchies.
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The highly acclaimed, provocative essay on feminism and sexual politics—from the award-winning author of Americanah
In this personal, eloquently-argued essay—adapted from the much-admired TEDx talk of the same name—Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie offers readers a unique definition of feminism for the twenty-first century. Drawing extensively on her own experiences and her deep understanding of the often masked realities of sexual politics, here is one remarkable author’s exploration of what it means to be a woman now—and an of-the-moment rallying cry for why we should all be feminists.
Valerie M. Hudson is a University Distinguished Professor and holds the George H.W. Bush Chair in the Department of International Affairs at The Bush School of Government and Public Service at Texas A&M University, where she directs the Program on Women, Peace, and Security. Hudson was named to the list of Foreign Policy magazine’s Top 100 Global Thinkers, and was recognized as Distinguished Scholar of Foreign Policy Analysis (FPA/ISA) and awarded an inaugural Andrew Carnegie Fellowship as well as an inaugural Fulbright Distinguished Chair in the Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences at Australian National University. She has been selected as the Distinguished Scholar Award recipient for 2022 by the Political Demography and Geography Section (PDG/ISA) of the International Studies Association.
This slim volume by the French philosopher is one I have read many times; nearly every sentence is underlined. Though not strictly about international affairs, it was Agacinski that first sparked in me the sight of the far horizon: diarchy as the political system that should obtain between men and women. Once you understand that the face of humanity is dual, not single, everything changes. Agacinski was one of the crucial voices that led to the adoption of party candidate parity as the law of the land in France.
Sylviane Agacinski has never shied away from controversy. Vilified by some-including many feminists-and celebrated by others as a pioneer of gender equality, she has galvanized the French political scene. Her articulation of the theory of "parity" helped inspire a law that went into effect in May 2000 requiring the country's political parties to fill 50 percent of the candidacies in every race with women. Sylviane Agacinski, according to The New Yorker, "is sometimes credited with making parite respectable." Agacinski begins with the notion that sexual difference should be affirmed rather than denied. Sex, Agacinski points out, is not a social,…
Not many people know that I was so timid as a child; I used to burst into tears if I had to ask for something in a store. Now, I am known for my “out there” presentation style and mastery of words. Since 1982, I have been working with individuals and groups to help them get better at persuading, solving conflicts, and having inspiring relationships. So, how can you be a nice, caring person and still be persuasive, even with the most skeptical of people? These books helped me do this.
I have read this book so many times! It changed how I communicate with people operating from the Traditional Male Model or the Traditional Female Model.
She explains that someone’s Operating Metaphor can be “Life is a game” or “Life is like a traditional classroom”. Game players want to win, and students want to get a great evaluation or pass an exam, so I need to shift my communication style for each.
And who knew that women and men have different definitions of common terms? A lie is either: “Saying something that is not true” or “Something that is not true and harmful!” This book showed me how specifically to develop my flexibility and stop being so judgy!
Communications guru Suzette Haden Elgin bridges the gender gap. In this groundbreaking book, the internationally acclaimed author of The Gentle Art of Verbal Self--Defense helps you anticipate and avoid the frustrating conversational knots in which men and women all too often find themselves entangled. Picking up where other authors leave off, Suzette Haden Elgin arms you with her proven techniques for dealing effectively with verbal confrontation in your personal and professional lives. She zeroes in on how to: aeo Identify the differences between womena s and mena s perceptions of the world and avoid the dangerous semantic traps they create…
The average person spends over 90,000 hours at work over a lifetime – that’s roughly one quarter to one third of a person’s life. I’m an academic researcher who studies work. I know how to design workplaces that are good for organizations (high productivity) and the people who work in them (high employee well-being). But if we leave it all up to senior management, we won’t generate positive changes fast enough. There’s a robust body of evidence that we can all use to make our local workplaces more supportive, inclusive, and fulfilling. I’m on a mission to make the world a better place, one workplace at a time.
Deborah Tannen has a unique ear for the different ways that men and women communicate.
The book resonated with my personal experiences, and helped me to understand why I was having different kinds of conversations with men than with women – particularly around work issues. Professor Tannen emphasizes that these communication styles are taught to us when we are very young (and they are reflected in the different games men and women play as children).
But that means we can change our communication styles too – we can communicate more clearly about our work-related needs, and adapt our communication patterns to better align with the listener. Professor Tannen inspired me to bring research evidence to the attention of people who can use it in their daily lives.
This guide highlights problems of communication between men and women, who can interpret the same conversation completely differently, even when there is no apparent misunderstanding. It examines how the sexes can work through communication barriers and get to the heart of the matter.
I have a PhD in sociology but know almost as much about anthropology. I am a comparative sociologist specializing in the study of the entire range of human societies. This gives me an advantage in knowing which social practices are universal, which are only common, and which are uncommon or not found at all. This is critical in being able to assess the basic features of human nature. For over thirty years I have been studying the literature on Darwinian approaches to human behavior, especially sociobiology and evolutionary psychology. I am one of the leading sociologists in the world today studying the biological basis of social behavior.
The author challenges the prevailing orthodoxy that the differences between men and women, and their respective roles in the work world, are the result of differential socialization. His view is that there are important biological differences between the sexes that lead them to choose different kinds of work. Women, for example, prefer jobs that involve working with people whereas men prefer working with things. Women also frequently choose part-time work because this allows them to spend more time with their children. Men are more likely than women to compete for high-status jobs because they are naturally more competitive than women. Male-female differences have been shaped over hundreds of thousands of years by evolution.
Does biology help explain why women, on average, earn less money than men? Is there any evolutionary basis for the scarcity of female CEOs in Fortune 500 companies? According to Kingsley Browne, the answer may be yes.
Biology at Work brings an evolutionary perspective to bear on issues of women in the workplace: the "glass ceiling," the "gender gap" in pay, sexual harassment, and occupational segregation. While acknowledging the role of discrimination and sexist socialization, Browne suggests that until we factor real biological differences between men and women into the equation, the explanation remains incomplete.
Over my twenty years as a historian, the common thread in my work is the gap between how people are supposedto behave and how they actually do behave. From interracial sexual relationships in the segregated South, to rum smuggling from Cuba during Prohibition, to abortion on college campuses before Roe, I'm interested in how people work around rules they don’t like. And rules about sex are some of the most ignored rules of all. Reading about strange beliefs and common desires connect us to our ancestors. Being a professor of history at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa, Alabama allows me to research bad behavior in the past to my heart’s content.
We assume people have always recognized two sexes, male and female. But did they? In the past, people believed men and women were the same sex; women were just incomplete, unfinished men. Men and women had the same sexual organs, with women’s located internally. Surprisingly, if conditions were right, women could even turn into men. They also thought women needed to achieve orgasm to conceive. That’s right. For over a thousand years of western history, women’s sexual pleasure was as important as men’s.
This is a book about the making and unmaking of sex over the centuries. It tells the astonishing story of sex in the West from the ancients to the moderns in a precise account of developments in reproductive anatomy and physiology. We cannot fail to recognize the players in Thomas Laqueur's story-the human sexual organs and pleasures, food, blood, semen, egg, sperm-but we will be amazed at the plots into which they have been woven by scientists, political activists, literary figures, and theorists of every stripe.
Laqueur begins with the question of why, in the late eighteenth century, woman's orgasm…
