Hello and welcome to ACFM. I'm Nadia Idol and today joining me for a chat about all

things technology is the award-winning finance journalist and writer Katrin Mercell. Katrin's first

book, Who Cooked Adam Smith's Dinner, has been translated into more than 20 languages. But it's

your latest book, The Mother of Invention, how good ideas get ignored in an economy built for men,

which we will be focusing on today. Katrin, welcome to the show. Thank you. So I thoroughly enjoyed

this fun, fact-filled, illuminating book, and it tackles everything from cars to sewing through

to computers. But before going into some of those subjects and talking about technology and

the different effects those have had on the world, also on women and how they came about,

I'd first like to ask you what drove you to write a book about technology?

I guess it was my mother actually who, when she got pregnant with me, I am Swedish,

so this was in Sweden in the early 80s. She decided that she wanted a more stable career. She had

worked at an art gallery a bit and then with the administration of library catalogs. So she decided

to do something which was still a natural thing to do for somebody with her background. She went

and studied computer science and became a computer programmer. So in that sense I did grow up in the

tech industry, but it was of course quite different because computer programming was still

quite female-dominated. It's shifted in the 80s, but I still remember most of my mother's

managers being women. And then obviously I saw all of this change and when my mother retired,

a few years back it was a completely different industry and computer programming had gone from

female-dominated, the first program as having been women, women having invented software and all

of these things to being very male-dominated. And a lot of things had happened with the status

and the pay as well. More men better pay higher status. And as somebody who wrote about economics

and money and these sort of things, it was something that fascinated me. So this connection between

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