Mother of Invention: How Good Ideas Get Ignored in an Economy Built for Men

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? For writer and journalist Katrine Marçal, the answer is both shocking and simple: because “real men” carried their bags, no matter how heavy.

Mother of I...