Women in Science Now - Lisa Munoz ***

This is not the first book to be published on women in science - a few months ago we had Athene Donald's excellent Not Just for the Boys, which put across across the picture of gender inequality in STEM, and how to address it, very clearly and effectively. This book attempts to do a similar thing, but does so in a way that will appeal to a different kind of audience - unfortunately I'm not part of that audience.

What Lisa Munoz does is give us a series of portraits (including literal sketches) of female scientists, grouped in nine sections all titled Fixing X, where X ranges from representation, signals and recruitment to environments and visibility. We get a strong feeling for the experiences of individual scientists, the struggles they have had, and the opposition they have faced. As often is the case, the book is far stronger on experiences than it is on solutions.

The whole thing is pulled together in four pages of 'key takeaways' at the back - the suggestions for ways of realistically fixing things, apart from the positive direction we've already seen seem very limited. There are, as mentioned in the subtitle, strategies introduced along the way, but this is very centred on the individual, rather than giving a big picture fix, where the problem itself is more in the hands of the academic establishment than individual scientists.

The book made me think of the way that the marketing of charities has changed over the years. It used to primarily take an intellectual view, giving us the overview picture and statistics. Now it has shifted to the emotive view, giving us photographs and details of individual sufferers and what they have gone through. I've always found this approach uncomfortably manipulative - and to an extent I felt this about the style of Women in Science Now too. I preferred Donald's straightforward viewpoint.

There is, of course, a reason that charity marketing has changed. Personalising stories does work in terms of getting people on side. But in a charity appeal, you will be told the story of one or two individuals. Here there are far too many to engage with. Even if I liked this approach, I would be overwhelmed by the number of different characters that are introduced.

It's an important cause, and there are some very effective stories here. But I'm not sure the format of the book does the topic justice.

Hardback:

Kindle:
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you
Review by Brian Clegg - See all Brian's online articles or subscribe to a weekly email free here

Comments

The Laws of Thought - Tom Griffiths *****

In giving us a history of attempts to explain our thinking abilities, Tom Griffiths demonstrates an excellent ability to pitch information just right for the informed general reader. We begin with Aristotelian logic and the way Boole and others transformed it into a kind of arithmetic before a first introduction of computing and theories of language. Griffiths covers a surprising amount of ground - we don't just get, for instance, the obvious figures of Turing, von Neumann and Shannon, but the interaction between the computing pioneers and those concerned with trying to understand the way we think - for example in the work of Jerome Bruner, of whom I confess I'd never heard. This would prove to be the case with a whole host of people who have made interesting contributions to the understanding of human thought processes. Sometimes their theories were contradictory - this isn't an easy field to successfully observe - but always they were interesting. But for me, at least, ...

The Infinity Machine - Sebastian Mallaby ****

It's very quickly clear that Sebastian Mallaby is a huge Demis Hassabis fan - writing about the only child prodigy and teen genius ever who was also a nice, rounded personality. After a few chapters, though, things settle down (I'm reminded of Douglas Adams' description of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy ) and we get a good, solid trip through the journey that gave us DeepMind, their AlphaGo and AlphaFold programs, the sudden explosion of competition on the AI front and thoughts on artificial general intelligence. Although Mallaby does occasionally still go into fan mode - reading this you would think that AlphaFold had successfully perfectly predicted the structure of every protein, where it is usually not sufficiently accurate for its results to have direct practical application - we get a real feel for the way this relatively unusual company was swiftly and successfully developed away from Silicon Valley. It's readable and gives an important understanding of...

Nanotechnology - Rahul Rao ****

There was a time when nanotechnology was both going to transform the world and wipe us out - a similar position to our view of AI today. On the positive transformation side there was K. Eric Drexler's visions in the 1986 Engines of Creation. Arguably as much science fiction as engineering possibilities, it predicted the ability to use vast armies of assemblers to put objects together from individual atoms. On the negative side was the vision of grey goo, out of control nanotechnology consuming all in its path as it made more and more copies of itself. In 2003, for instance, the then Prince Charles made the headlines when newspapers reported ‘The prince has raised the spectre of the “grey goo” catastrophe in which sub-microscopic machines designed to share intelligence and replicate themselves take over and devour the planet.’ These days the expectations have been eased down a notch or two. Where nanotechnology has succeeded, it has been with the likes of atom-thick mat...

Search This Blog