(M)otherhood

Pragya Agarwal is a behavioural and data scientist, Visiting Honorary Professor of Social Inequities and injustice in the UK, and founder of research think-tank 'The 50 Percent Project'. She was selected as a 'creative thinker' for innovative and interdisciplinary research by NESTA and given a Diverse Wisdom award by Hay House Publishing. Pragya has also held the Leverhulme Fellowship and other academic positions and fellowships at University College London, Johns Hopkins University and University of Melbourne. Pragya has written for the Guardian, Forbes, Scientific American and New Scientist as well as acclaimed peer-reviewed scholarly articles, and her creative non-fiction writing also appears in Literary Hub and AEON. She is the author of Sway: Unravelling Unconscious Bias, Wish We Knew What To Say: Talking With Children about Race, (M)otherhood: On the Choices of Being a Woman and Standing Up to Racism, her first book for children. She lives in the north-west of England. @DrPragyaAgarwal | drpragyaagarwal.com

In a world where women seemingly have more choices than ever, society continues to exert historical stigmas and pressures when it comes to having children. We define women by whether they embrace or reject motherhood; whether they can give birth or not.Drawing on her own experiences as a woman of South Asian heritage, behavioural scientist Pragya Agarwal interrogates the thinking behind this. Extremely open in its honesty and meticulously researched, (M)otherhood probes themes of infertility, childbirth and reproductive justice, and makes a powerful and urgent argument for the need to tackle society's obsession with women's bodies and fertility.