...some ambitious young people meet as university students and then twine and branch together and apart throughout their adult lives, in a near-futureworld of globally contracted professionalism and commercial science. Our heroine struggles not to make waves about the levels of more or less subtle sex discrimination she suffers while she pursues, erratically hot and cool, clues to a genetic shift that is already, quietly, transmuting our current gender conflicts--and perhaps all of society--into something new. ...the axis of the story is a central question of science fiction (as speculative inquiry rather than adventure-romance): what will it take to end social gender inequity--and what will it cost?
