Shami Chakrabarti

Overall, I was slightly disappointed with this book. My expectations for this were probably too high to begin with, and I do recognise that it is utterly impossible to attempt to fix all that is wrong in the world in less than 250 pages. Still, reading this book felt more like reviewing before an exam: featuring a great amount of information I already knew, it refreshed my memory but gave me very few new elements of reflection.

The book itself is structured very clearly, concentrating on major areas of social life to evaluate women's role and the issues that gender injustice helps perpetuate, or indeed generate in the first place. The focus is on different societies, spanning the whole world, and considers also historical evolutions.

While this is an undeniably well written, comprehensive account of gender policies around the world, I found myself wanting more. This read would probably be well-suited as an introduction to gender inequalities and feminism, but as someone who has already read up quite a lot on the subject, I found nothing noteworthy here. Not a bad book, but not one for me.

I received an e-arc of this book from the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for my honest review. This did not affect my opinion of the book in any way.… (mer)