PositiveThe New York Times Book ReviewIt’s easy to criticize this book. What good are two new words for stuff we already associate with male behavior or female behavior? For that matter, some of her advice for behaving congressively sounds a lot like signing up for emotional labor that—yes, I’ll say it—women already do too much of. More generally, just because she seems aware of institutional power doesn’t mean she has a viable approach to dealing with it. And yet, as a female mathematician who also grappled with the exact environment that she describes so well, I realize she’s put her finger on something that I hadn’t been able to articulate before, and her new notation helps ... This is an important topic and an important time to find better ways to have conversations. So even if there are weaknesses in this paradigm, most of them are identified and admitted by Cheng herself ... A theory doesn’t have to be perfect to be useful. I’d say the same for Cheng’s manifesto on gender.
