An illuminating and maddening examination of how gender bias skews innovation, technology, history, and work, by Swedish journalist Katrine Marcal

It all starts with a rolling suitcase.

The wheel was invented some five thousand years ago and the modern suitcase in the mid-nineteenth century, but it wasn’t until the 1970s that someone successfully married the two. What was the hold up? For writer and journalist Katrine Marcal, the answer is both shocking and simple: because “real men” carried their bags, no matter how heavy. There were rolling suitcases before the seventies, but they were marketed as a niche product for the presumably few women traveling alone, and the wheeled suitcase wasn’t “invented” until it was no longer threatening to masculinity.

Mother of Invention draws on this example and many others, from electric cars to tech billionaires, to show how gender bias stifles the economy and holds us back. Our traditional notions about men and women have delayed innovations, sometimes by hundreds of years, and have distorted our understanding of our history. While we talk about the Iron Age and the Bronze Age, we might as well talk about the Ceramic Age or the Flax Age, since these technologies were just as important. But inventions associated with women are not considered to be technology in the same way.

Katrine Marcal’s Mother of Invention is a fascinating examination of business, technology, and innovation through a feminist lens. Marcal takes us on a tour of the global economy, arguing that gendered assumptions dictate which businesses get funding, how we value work, and how we trace human progress. And it carries a powerful message: If we upend our biases, we can unleash our full potential, tackling climate change and wielding technology to become more human, rather than less.

How do you get your dinner? That is the basic question of economics. When economist and philosopher Adam Smith proclaimed that all our actions were motivated by self-interest, he used the example of the baker and the butcher as he laid the foundations for the “economic man.” He argued that the baker and butcher didn’t give bread and meat out of the goodness of their hearts. It’s an ironic point of view coming from a bachelor who lived with his mother for most of his life–a woman who cooked his dinner every night.

Nevertheless, the economic man has dominated our understanding of modern-day capitalism, with a focus on self-interest and the exclusion of all other motivations. Such a point of view disregards the unpaid work of mothering, caring, cleaning, and cooking. It insists that if women are paid less, then that’s because their labor is worthless. Economics has told us a story about how the world works, and we have swallowed it, hook, line, and sinker. This story has not served women well. Now it’s time to change it.

A kind of feminist Freakonomics, Who Cooked Adam Smith’s Dinner? charts the myth of the economic man–from its origins at Adam Smith’s dinner table to its adaptation by the Chicago School and its disastrous role in the 2008 Global Financial Crisis–in a witty and courageous dismantling of one of the biggest myths of our time.