Had It Coming by Globe and Mail reporter Robyn Doolittle is a finalist for the 2020 RBC Taylor Prize.

The $30,000 prize recognizes the best in Canadian literary nonfiction.

Had It Coming is an in-depth look at how attitudes around sexual harassment and assault are changing in the #MeToo era. Doolittle's investigative series Unfounded looked into sexual assault allegations using data gathered from over 870 police forces across the country and found that many cases were deemed "baseless" and not properly investigated.

Doolittle's previous book, Crazy Town: The Rob Ford Story, was published in 2014.

The other finalists are:

The winner will be revealed on March 2, 2020.

It was announced in November that 2020 will be the last year for the prize, which has been given out since 2000.

Doolittle was on CBC Radio's The Current to discuss Had It Coming.

You can read an excerpt from Had It Coming below.

In writing a book about #MeToo, I could have gone two ways.

The first, the easy route, would have been to lean into my own frustrations, anger, and indignation at the world, developed during 34 years of living as a human female. I could have collected those grievances — all those times that a man took credit for my work or a date pushed too far, or that time in a taxi when I barely escaped from the driver. I could have harnessed all the memories of men telling me to "Smile!," of my ideas not being taken seriously on account of my gender, of having my butt patted on the street or on public transit or at a bar. And I could have rolled it all in with the gnawing reality that in 2019 women continue to earn less for the same work as men, represent only a quarter of House of Commons seats, and — as of 2018 — total exactly one CEO among the top hundred most influential companies in Canada. That situation doesn't even begin to approach the level of inequality for women of colour or for women in countries where by law they're second-class citizens, where they're under the thumb of male guardians, where their access to education is limited, where they're routinely subjected to sexual violence as part of domestic life, or civil strife, or war. And then I could have taken that Molotov cocktail of resentment, lit it on fire, and lobbed it into the world, screaming, "Burn it all down!" That's a book that would have earned me a lot of love on Twitter. It would have been simple to talk about and promote. The fury that many women are experiencing and voicing right now is real and warranted, and writing 70,000 words about why would have been cathartic.

But that is not the book I've written.

At the time I started researching this book, I'd already spent more than two years immersed in many of these issues. I'm a journalist with The Globe and Mail and in the summer of 2015, I began investigating how police handle sexual assault allegations. As part of that research, I interviewed well over a hundred people connected to the criminal justice system — sexual assault complainants, police officers, lawyers, judges, sexual assault nurses, academics, activists, and front-line support workers. I'd read through thousands of pages of court transcripts and police files. Building on what I'd learned through that reporting, I turned my mind to the #MeToo movement. I thought I'd have firm opinions on everything related to the movement, but the more I read, the more I pushed myself beyond the confines of like-minded social media silos, the more open conversations I had with those in my social and business circles, the more I realized that that approach wasn't going to cut it. It's been done. I came to see that a more useful and honest book about #MeToo wouldn't shy away from the tough questions that the movement has raised.

Unfortunately, as a culture we aren't very good at having nuanced, complicated discussions. The public space is not a safe venue to talk about controversial subjects. Social media and call-out culture — the tendency to aggressively shame and reprimand people for real or perceived missteps — has seen to that. Instead, people are talking it out in private, with friends they trust not to rip them apart on Twitter. My goal with this book is to bring those discussions into the open.

At this extraordinary moment of change in how men and women interact, the path forward isn't simple. It's important, I believe, to uncover and evaluate the facts, to expose outdated myths that pervade institutions, and to bring rigour, openness, and compassion in equal measure to this very important conversation. I've come to embrace the nuance and messiness that comes with those tough conversations. So rather than lighting a match to that oily rag, with this book I've tried to make the case for progress as well as healthy debate.

Excerpted from Had It Coming by Robyn Doolittle. Copyright © 2019 by Robyn Doolittle. Published by Penguin, an imprint of Penguin Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited. Reproduced by arrangement with the Publisher. All rights reserved.