Gender

Early on, the data was “pretty clear that the pandemic recession would be a disaster for women,” said Debora Spar, professor and senior associate dean at Harvard Business School and author of “Work Mate Marry Love: How Machines Shape Our Human Destiny” and “Wonder Women: Sex, Power, and the Quest for Perfection.”

One such interpreter is Debora L. Spar, the dean of Harvard Business School Online, who writes at the intersection of tech and gender. In her new book, “Work Mate Marry Love,” she considers an emerging wave of innovations that she believes could upend how we experience relationships, reproduction, gender expression and death. “We will fall in love with nonhuman beings,” Spar predicts in the book’s opening pages, “and find ways to extend our human lives into something that begins to approximate forever.” Spar argues that new technologies spark shifts in the most intimate of human affairs, often in unexpected ways. She casts this as a causal relationship, one imbued with a sense of inevitability. The book’s subtitle, “How Machines Shape Our Human Destiny,” gives the machines the agency.

“The pandemic has involved much more than simply forcing scientists to work from home,” says Kyle Myers, a co-author of the survey of U.S. and European scientists and an economist at Harvard Business School. “It has forced them to manage childcare in new ways, prevented serendipitous conversations in the office hallways, and limited their ability to attend conferences or work at field sites or access certain equipment.”