The Genius of Women by Janice Kaplan

Author:Janice Kaplan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2020-02-17T16:00:00+00:00

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Women geniuses are always disrupters. They challenge a way of looking at the world or they dislodge an accepted truth or they overturn a standard approach to law or art or science. One reason we have trouble thinking of women as geniuses is that the gender norms—the very ones RBG fought—put women in a bucket of being social and friendly and nonconfrontational, which doesn’t sound like being disruptive at all. But not all women fit into that bucket. Even if they do, it’s irrelevant to their ability to turn the world upside down. As RBG has proven, you don’t have to look like a disrupter to be one.

Cynthia Breazeal doesn’t look like a disrupter, either—but she is one of the country’s biggest stars in the groundbreaking world of robotics. The day we met at her office at the MIT Media Lab happened to be a school holiday, and when she rushed over to meet me, she looked like a schoolkid herself, wearing slim athletic pants and a bulky sweater. She chatted comfortably for much of the afternoon, taking a couple of calls along the way from her teenage sons to discuss dinner plans and who was driving where and their complicated after-school schedules. Just your everyday mom. Watching her from a perch on her desk, though, was a little robot called Jibo, which she had created and marketed through a company she founded. Outside her office were shelves of more robots, created by the Personal Robots Group at MIT, which she started and leads. She was more proof that you can be conventional in one part of your life and an innovative genius breaking new ground in another.

Breazeal’s genius has had a profound impact on a field that is in itself disruptive—robotics. She works at the MIT Media Lab, a place that has been famous for the last thirty or so years for its huge influence in turning ideas upside down. No standard thinkers from already established fields need apply. The Media Lab welcomes only the brightest of bright people who don’t fit into existing disciplines because they are creating their own way of thinking. Breazeal is one of those unusual thinkers. She remembers watching Star Wars as a kid and falling in love with the robots, R2-D2 and C-3PO. Instead of begging her parents for Star Wars figurines like other kids might do, she started to imagine what it would be like for robots to have rich relationships with people. After college, she thought she might want to be an astronaut, and she applied to get a PhD in space robotics. (At some point she also thought she might want to be a professional tennis player, and she still has the confidence and ease of a professional athlete.) She landed in the lab of MIT professor Rodney Brooks, who was innovating with planetary micro-rovers—small robots that would be able to explore the solar system and traverse the rough terrain of distant planets.

The point of view in the

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