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Heyyy! He mentions Dunbar's number. (That was back at the beginning of chapter 8.)

I am LOVING some of the snark here XD

"worth is a matter of opinion, and opinion is informed by culture. And if that culture is as male-biased as ours is, it can't help but be biased against women. By default."

"a woman barely has to die before she is forgotten – or before we consign her work to the gender data gap by attributing it to a man."

"a 2015 study of multiple language Wikipedias found that the articles about women include words like 'woman,' 'female,' or 'lady;' but articles about men don't contain words like 'man,' 'masculine,' or 'gentleman' (because the male sex goes without saying)."

"getting rid of the generic masculine would only be half the battle: male bias is so firmly embedded in our psyche that even genuinely gender-neutral words are read as male."

"even if they had somehow managed to design an image of a 'gender neutral' runner, most of us would have read that runner as male, because we read most things as male unless they are specifically marked as female."

xiv - "Invisible Women is a story about absence." Some heavy unintentional irony there.

xiii - "Men do not have female bodies... By 'sex', I mean the biological characteristics that determine whether an individual is male or female. XX and XY."

There are different directions in which these statements could lead, but this book seems to be both binary and trans-exclusionary.

p xii - "One of the most important things to say about the gender data gap is that it is not generally malicious, or even deliberate. Quite the opposite. It is simply the product of a way of thinking that has been around for millennia and is therefore a kind of NOT thinking."

Chapter 9 is pretty exciting. Shevek sneaks out of the university & goes to the poor section of the city to find members of the working class who are looking to protest & perhaps organize a GENERAL STRIKE. Gracious. THEN, helicopters with machine guns show up over the protest and open fire. Dun dun DUNNNN! LeGuin's writing is beautiful & heartbreaking & I love Shevek so much & want to give him a hug.

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