Zo verschijnt er maandenlang niets en zo staat de postbode binnen één maand drie keer met een doosje vertalingen voor de deur. Dit boek had ik vorig jaar al vertaald, samen met Marijke van der Meer, maar het verschijnt nu pas. Ik heb zo'n vermoeden dat er met dit omslag bar weinig exemplaren van verkocht gaan worden, terwijl er best aardige dingen in staan. Jammer weer. Hieronder een recensie van Katherine Whitehorn uit The Guardian.
The XX Factor has the subtitle "How working women are creating a new society",
which sounds cheerful, but the book mainly suggests that though some
women have become far more equal to men, women are becoming much less
equal to one another. Time was when all women, rich or poor, were seen
as predominantly homemakers whatever else they did; but now in advanced
countries stacks of women are as well educated as men, and enjoy
important careers as well as raising children. Such parents strain to
get daughters as well as sons into the best schools, the best colleges
and be successful people, not just marry them. Less fortunate women are
much more likely to work in badly paid sex-segregated jobs, probably in
worse conditions, and are more likely to be single mothers. We may all
be sisters under the skin, but that's about all it is.
The various studies make it clear that it is education that's
the key to success – no wonder the Taliban are so against it. But even
education can be trumped by family: a qualified person may still lose an
appointment to a favoured son – but equally to a daughter; and even in
the US 90% of registered businesses are family ones.
The book is full of
intriguing facts: that half the world's self-made female billionaires
live in China; that in 1870 in the US there were precisely three female
lawyers, whereas there are now 300,000 – 40% of the whole; that, oddly,
Scandinavian countries hold the record for gender segregation because
they have gone the furthest in outsourcing traditional female activities
and turning unpaid home-based caring into formal employment; in the
developed world women still lag behind in engineering, but "have taken
over the marketing departments of our companies and nations". Part-time
work suits women well, as more and more of them work, but Americans
aren't wild about it since it carries no insurance.
Readably written,
the book's a mass of facts and surveys, interviews, statistics and
comparisons between countries; it could be a crucial bible for anyone
wanting to check up on anything about contemporary women.
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