Caves of Steel review, part 2

One of the other thoughts I want to share about Caves of Steel relates to gender roles. My first impression was that the story is almost completely populated by male characters, and the only female character is largely of no consequence. How typical, I thought, of a book from the fifties. I then started going through (just in my head) Asimov's other works that I've read, wondering if this is typical of him. Although there are a few counter examples (e.g. Susan Calvin, although she had the personality of a stereotypical male scientist), it does seem that his world is largely occupied by men. Should we forgive him this as a product of an earlier time, when in reality there were few women police officers, engineers, executives, astronauts, etc?

My mention of Susan Calvin brings me to the topic of my reading list for this venture (in a roundabout way, stick with me). I did some research on the origins of Foundation and how it grew from three 'original' novels to seven, with an expanded universe of fifteen novels and a collection of short stories authored by Asimov, plus additional novels and stories written by others after his death in 1992. The Wikipedia page titled “Foundation Series” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Foundation_Series) contains a listing of Asimov’s works from the Author’s note in Prelude to Foundation, the last Foundation book published while Asimov was alive (the last, Forward the Foundation , appears to have been completed before his death and published posthumously. It is from this list that I am working (see below).

Having read I, Robot several times, I chose not to re-read it in its entirety. I did review the final story in that collection, though, and was struck by how it prefigured some of the underlying concepts in Caves of Steel and the Foundation novels themselves. The crux of that story (The Evitable Conflict is that the artificial intelligences that plan and control all human economic activity have concluded that they can allow harm to some humans for the greater good of all humanity. The aforementioned Susan Calvin opines that this was inevitable, and that she realized from the development of the first positronic brain that humanity would ultimately follow these entities into an unknown, but presumably better future. The trajectory of human society, and its evitable nature, is the key question explored throughout Foundation. Should be a good ride!
List of Foundation works, in Asimov’s suggested reading order (with publication date in parentheses).

The Complete Robot (1982) and/or I, Robot (1950)
Caves of Steel (1954)
The Naked Sun (1957)
The Robots of Dawn (1983)
Robots and Empire (1985)
The Currents of Space (1952)
The Stars, Like Dust (1951)
Pebble in the Sky (1950)
Prelude to Foundation (1988)
Forward the Foundation (1993) [unpublished at the time this list was created]
Foundation (1951)
Foundation and Empire (1952)
Second Foundation (1953)
Foundation's Edge (1982)
Foundation and Earth (1986)