Katrine Kielos-Marçal offers an illuminating and maddening examination of how gender bias has skewed innovation, technology, and history.

It all starts with a rolling suitcase. Though the wheel was invented some five thousand years ago, and the suitcase in the nineteenth century, it wasn’t until the 1970s that someone successfully married the two. What was the hold up? The answer is both shocking and simple: because “real men” carried their bags, no matter how heavy.

Katrine’s latest book Mother of Invention is a fascinating and eye-opening examination of business, technology, and innovation through a feminist lens. Because it wasn’t just the suitcase. Gender bias stifles the economy and holds us back, delaying innovations, sometimes by hundreds of years, and distorting our understanding of our history. While we talk about the Iron Age and the Bronze Age, we might as well talk about the “Ceramic Age” or the “Flax Age,” since these technologies were just as important. But inventions associated with women are not considered to be technology in the same way.

This is a sweeping tour of the global economy with a powerful message: if we upend our biases, we can unleash our full potential.

Katrine Kielos-Marçal is a bestselling author on women and innovation.

Her first book Who Cooked Adam Smith’s Dinner? has been translated into more than 20 languages. Margaret Atwood called it “a smart, funny and readable book on women, economics and money”. It was named one of The Guardian’s books of the year in 2015. BBC also named Katrine one of its 100 Women in 2015.

Katrine’s second book Mother Of Invention: How Good Ideas Get Ignored In An Economy Built For Men was shortlisted for Business Book of the Year in Germany and for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction in the US.

GOOD READS

Who Cooked Adam Smith’s Dinner? (2012), MOTHER OF INVENTION: How Good Ideas Get Ignored In An Economy Built For Men  (2020)