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There Are No Girls on the Internet

What the wheelie suitcase tells us about misogyny and innovation

There Are No Girls on the Internet

iHeartPodcasts

Society & Culture, Technology

4.4820 Ratings

🗓️ 19 July 2022

⏱️ 32 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

We have had the wheel for some 5,000 years. And we’ve had suitcases since the 19th century. But we didnt get wheels on suitcases until the 1970s. 

 

Swedish journalist Katrine Marçal explains what this tells us about gender, misogyny and how it's hurting all of us.

 

Check out Katrine's book Mother of Invention: How Good Ideas Get Ignored in an Economy Built for Men: https://www.katrinemarcal.com/books

Follow Katrine on Twitter:https://twitter.com/katrinemarcal

 

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Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0

We are so invested in this idea of gender and, you know, that often, that it really is more

0:07.7

important to us to sort of uphold rigid ideas around gender and what it is than even to make

0:14.4

money, right? We are willing to lose money in order to uphold this system.

0:23.9

There are no Girls on the Internet as a production of IHeart Radio and UnBossed Creative.

0:32.1

I'm Bridget Todd, and this is There Are No Girls on the Internet.

0:39.3

Something I have long been stunned by are all the different ways that things like misogyny

0:41.3

and really rigid assumptions around things like gender

0:44.3

hurt everyone, not just women.

0:46.3

Now some ways are super obvious,

0:49.3

but others are a little more subtle.

0:51.3

Like the ways misogyny has held back innovation when it comes to technology.

0:56.0

In her fantastic book, called Mother of Invention, how good ideas get ignored in a world built for men,

1:03.0

Swedish journalist and author, Katrina Marsall, uncovers how masagony has stalled innovation.

1:10.0

And she starts by looking at the history of the

1:12.7

wheelie suitcase. So we've had the wheel for some 5,000 years, and we've had suitcases since the

1:19.8

19th century, but we didn't get technology to put wheels on suitcases until the 70s. Why?

1:27.4

Frustratingly, the answer lies in gender.

1:31.2

Katrina explains what it tells us about all the different ways that gender assumptions have

1:35.1

held us all back. It's this classic mystery of innovation that many economists have talked about,

1:43.8

which is that we invented the wheel 5,000 years ago,

1:48.0

and we apply this technology of the wheel to a lot of things throughout the ages,

1:54.0

with at least one very famous exception, which was the suitcase.

...

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