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

Phenomena - Camille Juzeau and the Shelf Studio ****

I am always a bit suspicious of books that are highly illustrated or claim to cover 'almost everything' - and in one sense this is clearly hyperbole. But I enjoyed Phenomena far more than I thought I would. The idea is to cover 125 topics with infographics. On the internet these tend to be long pages with lots of numbers and supposedly interesting factoids. Thankfully, here the term is used in a more eclectic fashion. Each topic gets a large (circa A4) page (a few get two) with a couple of paragraphs of text and a chunky graphic. Sometimes these do consist of many small parts - for example 'the limits of the human body' features nine graphs - three on sporting achievements, three on biometrics (e.g. height by date of birth) and three rather random items (GNP per person, agricultural yields of various crops and consumption of coal). Others have a single illustration, such as a map of the sewers of Paris. (Because, why wouldn't you want to see that?) Just those two s...

The Bright Side - Sumit Paul-Choudhury ***

When I first saw The Bright Side (the subtitle doesn't help), I was worried it was a self-help manual, a format that rarely contains good science. In reality, Sumit Paul-Choudhury does not give us a checklist for becoming an optimist or anything similar - and there is a fair amount of science content. But to be honest, I didn't get on very well with this book. What Paul-Choudhury sets out to do is to both identify what optimism is and to assess its place in a world where we are beset with big problems such as climate change (which he goes into in some detail) that some activists position as an existential threat. This is all done in a friendly, approachable fashion. In that sense it's a classic pop-psychology title. For me, Paul-Choudhury certainly has it right about the lack of logic of extreme doom-mongers, such as Extinction Rebellion and teenage climate protestors, and his assessment of the nature of optimism seems very reasonable, if presented at a fairly overview leve...

Rakhat-Bi Abdyssagin Five Way Interview

Rakhat-Bi Abdyssagin (born in 1999) is a distinguished composer, concert pianist, music theorist and researcher. Three of his piano CDs have been released in Germany. He started his undergraduate degree at the age of 13 in Kazakhstan, and having completed three musical doctorates in prominent Italian music institutions at the age of 20, he has mastered advanced composition techniques. In 2024 he completed a PhD in music at the University of St Andrews / Royal Conservatoire of Scotland (researching timbre-texture co-ordinate in avant- garde music), and was awarded The Silver Medal of The Worshipful Company of Musicians, London. He has held visiting affiliations at the Universities of Oxford, Cambridge and UCL, and has been lecturing and giving talks internationally since the age of 13. His latest book is Quantum Mechanics and Avant Garde Music . What links quantum physics and avant-garde music? The entire book is devoted to this question. To put it briefly, there are many different link...

Search This Blog