Work Left Undone: Choices & Compromises of Talented Women

Work Left Undone: Choices and Compromises of Talented Females. By Sally Morgan Reis, Creative Learning Press, Storrs, CT, 1998Reis provides a very comprehensive look at the problems gifted girls face in reaching their potential. She begins by laying out the complex choices faced by women in our current society, particularly the conflicts felt acutely by gifted girls. Subsequent chapters address particular groups of obstacles and barriers including those that are "external" such as cultural attitudes, lack of family supports, etc., and those that are internal such as psychological factors and personality issues. Reis addresses special groups of girls including girls who are culturally diverse or economically disadvantaged, women in science and mathematics, talented artists, older gifted women, and women who opt for a conventional career. The book ends with a chapter devoted to recommendations and a chapter with a broad array of resources of all types.

This book should be read by everyone, esp. gifted women. As a researcher in this area myself and author of Where Have All the Smart Women Gone? I concur that there are some very hard choices. The women in my research told me and over and over about wanting to go in one direction, but being discouraged from doing so. I called it Double Bind. This is a comforting, affirming book, yet also an academically well written book. Please read it.

Work Left Undone helps readers understand the choices which they have made and how attitudes (both positive and negative), stereotypes, and personal feelings have affected the direction of their lives. Readers learn the value of planning for the future and making conscious forward-thinking decisions based on real abilities and real hopes and aspirations instead of leaving life up to lucky or unlucky accidents of fate. What we want for our daughters, what we hope for as we educate girls is to give them the confidence and ability to make these choices without regret and to value their work in their family, the community and corporate world. Sally Reis' work accomplishes much to this end.

Work Left Undone: Choices and Compromises of Talented Females by Sally Reis. Creative Learning Press. Sally Reis is chiefly known today for her leadership in the National Association for Gifted Children, her professorial work at the University of Connecticut, and as a research fellow of the National Research Center on Gifted and Talented, but her career spans nearly three decades and includes many years as both a junior high school English teacher and as a teacher in programs for gifted and talented students. In 1976, she worked with a sixth-grade gifted girl, Heather, who designed and built a robot. Following publicity about the robot in the local press, many adults came to the school to meet Heather and see her product. After a time, Heather came to Reis and shared a disappointing conclusion she had reached. Women talked to her about how she designed the robot, the parts she used, and how it operated. Men invariably asked her if she had created the robot to do housework. Reis counseled Heather that she surely must be mistaken, to which the child responded, "You just didn't notice." In succeeding weeks Reis, aware of Heather's concern, became more observant and discovered to her dismay that the child was absolutely correct. This early passage inWork Left Undone: Choices & Compromises of Talented Females serves as a touchstone, revealing the essence of the book. Reis had deliberately chosen a women's college for her own college education and the incident described took place in 1976, at a time when the issue of women's rights was a dominant national media theme, and yet even she had not picked up on the subtle stereotyping that was occurring when visitors came to Heather's school to observe her engineering project. As the student charged: she just didn't notice. Reis writes of the lesson learned: "This experience caused me to consciously notice more and assume less." The failure of contemporary society and its institutions to notice stereotyping and the resulting prejudices that work against females in our society is one of the dominant themes of Work Left Undone. One cannot read this book and leave its pages unaware of the lack of equity for females, and especially gifted females, in America. In part one of the book, the author explores the specific issues and barriers that face gifted and talented women. She shares a massive amount of data from studies over the past three decades that make a convincing case that different and unequal conditions exist for males and females in our classrooms and work places. Males vocally dominate classrooms from kindergarten through graduate school and receive far more attention than do females. Gifted women may face even more discrimination in college, especially in science and math programs, where the faculty is predominantly male, and often foreign males, who may bring to the classroom cultural stereotypes about the supposed inferiority of w