Indra Nooyi, Chairman and CEO, PepsiCo at World Economic Forum 2008

A couple of days ago I picked up the new Time magazine at Lunds (an impulse purchase I usually resist since I don’t even keep up with the magazines I subscribe to) because the cover story caught my eye—The State of the American Woman.

• In 1972, women earned fewer than 10% of law and medical degrees; today they are near parity.
• Women now get about half of the Ph.D.s (compared to 15% in 1972) and 60% of the Master’s degrees (up from about 40% in 1972).

That is a huge shift in a society in a relatively short period.

Towards the end I read this:

If male jobs keep vanishing, if physical strength loses its workplace value, if the premium shifts ever more to education, in which achievement is increasingly female, then we will soon be having parallel conversations: What needs to be done to free American men to realize their full potential?

My knee-jerk response is: Oh yes of course everything is once again about men! But. Think about that—it’s interesting. Men have lost more jobs than women in this recession—primarily in construction and manufacturing—and everyone is talking about the emerging and growing knowledge economy.

So where does that leave men? Men are, of course, still the vast majority of CEOs and world leaders. But the vast majority of men are not CEOs or world leaders. Most men, like most women, are in everyday relationships with people they love—partner, spouse, family (I refer to the broadest [and happiest, if I dare say] definitions of the aforementioned). Really, don’t we all just want to get along?

And don’t we all just want to reach our fullest potential—in all aspects of our lives?

I am looking forward to these conversations.

photo by Celestial Photography @ flickr

I have finally finished Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain, by Maryanne Wolf. I have always loved to read (as far back as I can remember) and have a healthy respect for the reading brain, but this book reminded me just exactly how complex reading is.

That anyone can learn to read—it’s practically a miracle, there are so many developmental processes that have to come together. There’s phonological development (understanding the small units of sound that make up words). There’s orthographic development (learning that writing represents oral language, and then learning the features of letters, common letter patterns, and how to spell all these various words). There’s semantic and pragmatic development—learning about the meanings of words and often the multiple meanings of words. There’s syntactic development—learning all the grammatical forms as well as the rules of sentence structure and how events relate to each other in a text. And then there’s morphological development, which is learning the conventions around word formation: prefixes, suffixes and root words.

photo by McBeth @ flickr

Doesn’t it make you impressed with yourself that you learned to read at all? But it’s a long road to reading, starting with the “emerging pre-reader.” Think of Dad holding you on his lap while he reads you a story (or reads the newspaper, for that matter). According to Wolf:

The association between hearing written language and feeling loved provides the best foundation for this long process [of learning to read], and no cognitive scientist or educational researcher could have designed a better one. . . .The more children are spoken to, the more they will understand oral language. The more children are read to, the more they understand all the language around them, and the more developed their vocabulary becomes.

And that’s hugely important because children have to learn about 88,700 written words during their school years. At least 9,000 of these words need to be learned by the end of grade 3!

Wolf ends the book with two fascinating chapters on dyslexia. I learned a lot about how complex dyslexia is, as well as its gifts and challenges. Dyslexics often have remarkable spatial talents and many are able to read equally well upside down or in a mirror. The author’s son is dyslexic and she includes in the book a drawing he did of the Leaning Tower of Pisa—upside down! Many architects are dyslexic, and among the famed with dyslexia are Charles Schwab, the sculptor Rodin, Andy Warhol, Picasso, Danny Glover, Keira Knightley, Whoopi Goldberg, Johnny Depp, John Irving, Thomas Edison, Leonardo da Vinci and Albert Einstein. An impressive bunch. As Wolf says:

It is in the highest interests of our society to protect the potential contributions of our children with dyslexia. . . .There is a necessity that we help them endure what is difficult and foster their resilience, so that they are prepared to invent the next lightbulb when they are ready.