Katrine Marçal – Inspiration Day 2022 Speaker
Katrine Marçal is a Swedish journalist and bestselling author on the intersection between economics, women and innovation. Her books present compelling data about how our ingrained societal ideas about gender have held us back.
Working for the Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter, Katrine has interviewed some of the world’s leading economic thinkers from Nassim Taleb to Mariana Mazzucato. Some of her interviews have been viewed more than a million times on YouTube. She also was among a handful of journalists who had an exclusive interview with Michelle Obama prior to her book publication.
Her first book Who Cooked Adam Smith’s Dinner? takes apart the underlying principles about economic thinking from the father of modern economics through to modern day. She explores how the omission of uncompensated care and the undervaluing of feminised workspaces underpins the current economic structures. Her second book Mother Of Invention: How Good Ideas Get Ignored In An Economy Built For Men explores how defining inventions from the past and potential future innovations are shaped by entrenched beliefs about the roles of men and women within society. She explains why it took more than 5,000 years to attach wheels to a suitcase, as well as why the production of electric cars was halted because they were considered too feminine.
Alongside her writing and journalism, she lectures at institutions such as Oxford University Business and Economics Programme, London School of Economics and The Royal School of Technology in Stockholm.