We are pleased to announce that Caryl Rivers, bestselling author, critic, and professor of journalism at Boston University, will be our keynote speaker on Friday, June 13. Come join us for this remarkable opportunity to make a genuine, forward-moving difference in the professional lives of science writers. Register today.
About Caryl Rivers
Caryl Rivers is a nationally known author, journalist, media critic, and professor of journalism at Boston University. In 2007, she was awarded the Helen Thomas Lifetime Achievement Award from the Society of Professional Journalists for distinguished journalism. Her new book (with Dr. Rosalind Barnett of Brandeis) is The New Soft War on Women (Tarcher/Penguin). It was an Oprah Top Ten. Selling Anxiety: How the News Media Scare Women was published by University Press of New England.
Her articles have appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Daily Beast, Huffington Post, Salon, The Nation, Saturday Review, Ms., Mother Jones, Dissent, McCalls, Glamour, Redbook, Rolling Stone, Ladies Home Journal, and many others. She writes frequent commentary for the Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Boston Globe, Chicago Tribune, and Womens eNews.
Rivers is the author of four novels and ten works of non-fiction, all critically acclaimed. Her books have been selections of the Book of the Month Club, Literary Guild, Doubleday Book Club, and Troll Book club. Columbia University Press published her book of media criticism, Slick Spins and Fractured Facts, in 1996. In a review, Gloria Steinem says the book “will save the sanity of media watchers enraged or bewildered by the distance between image and reality.”
She has won a Casey Medal for distinguished journalism about children and families and a special citation from the National Education Writers Association. Her coming of age novel, “Virgins” sold more than a million copies around the world and will be republished by Diversion Press this coming summer. The Chicago Tribune said, “Few other writers are as funny as she, and none funnier. Yet she is capable of wrenching your heart and soul.”
One of her memorable moments as a Washington journalist came from a small press briefing with FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, during which he said that Martin Luther King was the “most notorious liar in the country.” Rivers’ story was on the front pages of many newspapers the next day, after UPI picked up her story. (Her son is now an FBI agent.)
Rivers’ latest book, The New Soft War on Women: How the Myth of Female Ascendance Is Hurting Women, Men–and Our Economy, with Dr. Rosalind Barnett, sets the tone for this conference.
About the book
(Publisher information): For the first time in history, women make up half the educated labor force and are earning the majority of advanced degrees. It should be the best time ever for women, and yet … it’s not. Storm clouds are gathering, and the worst thing is that most women don’t have a clue what could be coming. In large part this is because the message they’re being fed is that they now have it made. But do they? In The New Soft War on Women, respected experts on gender issues and the psychology of women Caryl Rivers and Rosalind C. Barnett argue that an insidious war of subtle biases and barriers is being waged that continues to marginalize women. Although women have made huge strides in recent years, these gains have not translated into money and influence. Consider the following:
- Women with MBAs earn, on average, $4,600 less than their male counterparts in their first job out of business school.
- Female physicians earn, on average, 39 percent less than male physicians.
- Female financial analysts take in 35 percent less, and female chief executives one quarter less than men in similar positions.
In this eye-opening book, Rivers and Barnett offer women the real facts as well as tools for combating the “soft war” tactics that prevent them from advancing in their careers. With women now central to the economy, determining to a large degree whether it thrives or stagnates, this is one war no one can afford for them to lose.
Solutions 2014 
June 24, 2014 at 8:01 am
[…] Solutions Summit took place at MIT on June 13-15. The events began with an evening keynote from Caryl Rivers, author of The New Soft War on Women. [A link to Bethany Brookshire’s summary of the speech will […]