A review by balletbookworm
The Glass Universe: How the Ladies of the Harvard Observatory Took the Measure of the Stars by Dava Sobel

slow-paced

3.0

This is...fine. It's a thorough history of the Harvard Observatory and how the women who worked there as computers and examined the glass plates to measure the stars advanced the science. However, it's presented almost as a utopia where everyone was ever so nice and nothing bad ever happened at the workplace, despite being an underpaid and undervalued workforce because patriarchy and the old academic saw that people will work themselves to exhaustion for the love and passion of "The Science". If those women hadn't been brilliant and <i>WILLING</i> to do that grunt work for little to no money, they would have had no utility to the Observatory. I am a woman who works in academic medicine, and has since the late-90s, so you cannot tell me that there wasn't friction or harassment or worse and that all the men treated all the women with great respect just because the two Observatory directors on record expressed admiration for their work in letters that they knew were likely to be preserved for the public record. 

The audiobook is extremely slow (I mean S L O W) and the final 1.5 hours constitutes the backmatter including sources, a timeline, glossary, biographies, etc.