I’ll be speaking to the Humanist Association of Toronto in mid June.

Saturday, June 12
1:30 – 3:00
OISE, 252 Bloor St W, Room 2-213

 http://humanisttoronto.blogspot.com/2010/05/hat-monthly-meeting-sat-june-12-gender.html

The talk will be mostly about The Gender Divide but I may discuss other works in progress depending on time and interest.

The event is open to all so if you live in the GTA or are visiting, feel free to drop by.

If you have any questions about Humanism, leave them in the comments section or email me , and I’ll pose them to the group.

Hope to see you there.

I came across this article about ‘teen mums’ quite a while ago and while I didn’t agree with the premise of it I wasn’t sure about how to approach it. I saved the article for future consideration but didn’t do anything else.

Then I  came across this article about how

“…female workers feel pressure to furiously climb the career ladder before taking time off to start a family.”

The approach of this article was almost the antithesis of the article about teen mums but the heart of both articles deals with the challenge of balancing having a family and having a career.

The article about teen mums postulates the idea of having children before having a career.  Physically it’s the best time for it but there is more to having a child than just getting pregnant. Leaving aside issues like postpartum depression, having a child is extremely demanding no matter how you measure it - physically, mentally, emotionally, financially, or even sociologically. While many teens may be fully capable of ‘running a home’, how many teens can afford a home in the first place?

The article states, presumably tongue in cheek,

“…show me a fortysomething working mother who doesn’t feel exhausted and overwhelmed and I will show you a woman on very effective mood stabilizers.”

To me it seems fairly clear that the added mental and emotional maturity, not to mention the financial resources, afforded by the additional twenty-six plus years would make a world of difference in how the fortysomething working mother deals with issues as opposed to how the teen mom, with limited resources, education, and perspective, deals with the same issues.

On the other side of the coin, the article about the ‘pre-mommy mentality’ advocates the opposite approach. Work harder.

Pamela Jeffery, founder of the Toronto-based Women’s Executive Network, which offers career mentoring programs, says she encounters women on a daily basis who are racing for career advancement while they’re in their late 20s and early 30s.

“The No. 1 question I find in our mentoring programs is ‘How do I do it all? How do I have a great career and be a
mom?’ ”

Her advice: Put in the extra work early on.

Wow. Talking about being caught in the middle.

This is something that has always fascinated me as a science fiction writer and was one of the ideas running in the back of my mind while I was writing The Gender Divide. With an extended life span, it would be possible for both parents to take a hiatus from work and take the time to raise a child. As it stands now, too many people have children then leave the raising of them to strangers. As one of the women in the ‘pre-mummy mentality” article states…

“So I kept working harder … so that one day I could at least pay for someone else to raise them…”

I honestly don’t know the answer is or what the best time to have children is but I’m hopeful that one day society and perhaps even technology will help us find the solution.

I’m probably dating myself with this reference but an article in the Globe and Mail today reminded me of this old Red Rose Tea commercial.

The article in question refers to the Canadian habit of removing Canadian references when writing in order to be able to sell books in the United States. One would think that as a science fiction writer I would be somewhat immune to this affliction. However when I wrote The Gender Divide, I struggled with this issue.

Strangely enough it wasn’t so much the location that I struggled with. For most science fiction authors, many of our locations and environments are completely fictional and the reader has to rely on the writer to properly describe it. Ironically when writing The Gender Divide I used an American location (California, outside of LA) but only because that was the location where the idea of writing The Gender Divide came to me and I couldn’t envision it somewhere else.

The changes I did make to The Gender Divide to ‘Americanize’ it were in the areas of spelling and measurement. In retrospect it’s odd how much I worried about such inconsequential issues when there are so many more items that define Canada. Perhaps it took the recent Vancouver Olympics and the not so recent (or over) financial crisis to help me focus on what it really means to be Canadian.

I’ll leave you with this American perspective on Canada (we Canadian’s are normally too modest to do this sort of thing, despite our fierce, albeit restrained, pride in ourselves and our country).

Womenomics.

n. The theory that women play a primary role in economic growth.

You won’t find this word in any dictionaries yet but that is only a matter of time. The definition above is courtesy of Word Spy, The Word Lovers Guide to New Words but Womenomics is already being discussed in serious publications.

A recent op-ed piece in the Washington Post called Fixing the Economy? It’s Women’s Work discusses the role that women can and perhaps should play in terms of business and the economy. The argument is simple and compelling:

“Companies with more women in senior management roles make more money.”

Hard to argue with success. (more…)

Originally posted on The Writers Vineyard

“What’s in a name? That which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet.”

Romeo and Juliet (II, ii, 1-2)

What’s in a name? Good question Shakespeare, thanks for the segue.

When I wrote The Gender Divide, the title came to me very early on in the process. (more…)

Originally posted on The Writers Vineyard

I’m very excited. My science fiction novel, The Gender Divide, was just released by Champagne Books on May 1st.

In celebration, I thought that I would share with you a little about how I came to write The Gender Divide.

It all started when I had just finished re-reading Blind Waves, (more…)

A recent article from ‘Down Under’ talked about the gap in lifetime earnings between men and women. Despite the fact that female workers in their 20’s and 30’s are paid as much as their male counterparts, the article points out that men will earn more than women during their working lives.

A 25-year-old man’s potential earnings over the next 40 years is $2.4 million, compared to $1.4 million for a woman of the same age.

While the reasons for this are not really surprising (more…)

Here is the new cover art for The Gender Divide (click to see a larger version).

It is very different from the old cover art, (more…)

Originally posted on The Writers Vineyard

It is quite remarkable how quickly time passes. It seems like only yesterday that I received the wonderful news that Champagne Books agreed to publish The Gender Divide. First edits came and went and just last week I received the Advance Reader Copy for final review.

I’ve spent most of the weekend re-reading The Gender Divide. I had read through it once already during the first edit but (more…)

Well, I thought I’d start my first post of the year off with a bit of good news. The Gender Divide has been picked up by Champagne Books with a publication date of May 2009. (more…)