Mother of Invention
How Good Ideas Get Ignored in an Economy Built for Men
Katrine Marçal
Having read it
★★★★★
Quite simply brilliant and a book that should be read by all, especially the patriarchy!
It has an effective, to the point approach that is clearly backed by good research and directly shows that the legacies of masculinity don’t always and aren’t helping, more so currently, in humanity’s efforts to not try and control every single thing, think and develop a ‘manly technical solution’ and show who’s boss, but respect, collaborate, adapt and learn from the world (mostly nature) in this rather fractured, early part of our twenty-first century; be more of a prophet rather than a wizard and have a bit of both in your approach to life.
It was also good to read a book that articulated, posited and formed ideas about some thoughts I’ve held (for a good few years, but certainly more so in the last few) and no doubt not articulated (or written) very well about society and its approaches to many things and how really, progress is possible and actually quite simple. It just requires masculinity to get over itself and stop trying to prove it can win, have control, show who’s right etc. etc.
A good passage
In sum, the suitcase began to roll when we changed our perspective on gender: that men must carry, and that women’s mobility must be limited. Gender answers the riddle of why it took some 5,000 years for us to put wheels on our bags.
This answer may come as a surprise. After all, we don’t imagine the ‘soft’ (notions of femininity and masculinity) as being capable of holding back the ‘hard’ (constant technological advancement).
But that was precisely what happened with the suitcase. And if it could happen with the suitcase, then our notions of gender must really be quite robust.
A second good passage
It can escape no one who hears Aina Wifalk’s story that the rollator was possible precisely because of who she was. Her experience of illness and disability is what made her think the way she did. Diversity is absolutely crucial to the best ideas coming through. This is not the case today, and it’s far from just a question of discrimination: it lies within the backbone of our very financial system.
The companies that struggle to find backing are the more modest projects: practical innovations that it is quite easy to see turning a profit. To a large extent these are the types of companies that women establish, and they don’t fit within the whaling logic [a masculine approach/process].
That women are shut out of economically is a waste that we can ill afford, especially since we are now facing perhaps the greatest collective innovation problem in history.
A third good passage
Climate change is not only the greatest innovation problem of our day; it is also a problem that is tangled up in many of our ideas about gender. To be a real man is to dominate nature – not make compromises for its benefit. And the latter is precisely what the climate emergency appears to require of us today.
We have contrived an idea of a certain type of gas-guzzling lifestyle as ‘manly’ and then placed this masculine logic above all other values. So when it turns out that this patriarchal male lifestyle is unsustainable, we find we can’t give it up. Because we have placed it above all else. Even death itself.
Many of the men who deny climate change also despise the climate movement’s prominent female figures with an intensity that is far from incidental or rooted in a personal distaste for teenage Swedish girls with plaits. Instead it relates to their perceptions of the climate movement as a threat to the modern, fossil-fuel based industrial society that has been dominated by their own brand of straight white masculinity. If fossil fuel goes, then masculinity goes with it, they imagine.