In an interview earlier this month, Shami Chakrabarti insisted that her new book about global gender inequality should not be seen as an attempt on her part to scramble back on to safe liberal ground following the trouble of last year – when, as you will recall, her report into allegations of antisemitism within the Labour party was widely condemned as a whitewash (in an act that brought her integrity into further doubt, she accepted a peerage from Jeremy Corbyn just a few weeks later). It’s not only that she stands by the work she did then. Such a volume has, she said, been “coming for some time”.

Can this be true? Of Women has the appearance of a book that was written in a great hurry, not least because it references so many recent events, among them the Grenfell Tower fire, the TV adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s novel The Handmaid’s Tale, and the row about the pay gap at the BBC (a story that did not even break until July this year). Its author’s research, moreover, seems to have comprised only the most cursory kind of reading, a few conversations with friends, and the odd internet search. (In a chapter devoted to faith, for instance, she notes that the website of Reform Judaism cites the Talmud in condemning marital rape; this is her sole source on the matter, as it is on anything to do with Judaism.) Why, you find yourself wondering, would someone who had thought long and deeply about feminism rely on the words of a fictional suffragette – Chakrabarti quotes Maud Watts, the character played by Carey Mulligan in the “great” film, Suffragette – rather than those of, say, Millicent Fawcett or Susan B Antony? When finally she does pick up a key text such as Germaine Greer’s “legendary” The Female Eunuch, her exasperatingly indefinite summaries – “Greer discusses this in very many contexts, and with a number of arguments” – see all of its unholy power draining rapidly away.

This isn’t to suggest that haste can’t be a great thing in a book. Occasionally, it can. None of this would matter if Chakrabarti was a stylist, her prose boiling with Swiftian rage; if she had an original point of view, or even the odd brilliant solution to the many inequalities she relates, I wouldn’t care if she’d dashed off Of Women in a couple of weeks (though a book about fairness whose author once described antisemitic abuse as “unhappy incidents” might still stick in my craw). But neither of these is the case. Her prose is waffly and platitudinous.

Of first-wave feminism she writes bizarrely: “I am no great surfer of the sea or the net and don’t delight in the ‘wave’ jargon much.” Of Islam’s attitude to women she notes vaguely: “It would seem that there is no more one definitive Islam than there is one Christianity, or a single version of feminist thought.” In place of an extended argument, she simply delivers to her readers a series of quotidian outrages with which they are likely already to be all too wearily familiar – among other things, domestic abuse, female genital mutilation, the misogyny of social media, and the ongoing inequalities of the workplace – after which, not wanting to sound too pessimistic, she will suddenly come over all self-help manual (“Life can be wonderful. It can be full of joy and excitement as well as loss and sadness”).

She is – getting to solutions – in favour of female quotas, though only sometimes; she also wishes children’s clothes and toys could be less gender-bound. Beyond this, however, she seems to have relatively few solid ideas as to how we might proceed in future.

Her attempt to cover so much territory in one volume is, I am sure, well intentioned: we are all in this together, after all. But while I don’t disagree with much of what she has to say either about our own situation or that of the developing world – how could I, when she is on the side of abortion rights, easy access to reproductive healthcare, and ethical seed loans? – it’s difficult not to take exception to the double standards that litter her text so casually. Theresa May is admired for the way she trades on being “feminine without flirting”, but criticised furiously for her prolonged holding of Trump’s hand at her meeting with him in Washington (did she have much of a choice?). The Labour party, whose current leader initially had such trouble appointing women to the shadow cabinet in which she now sits as attorney general, is defended on the grounds that female representation isn’t all about “figureheads”. Those she refers to as “self-avowed” feminists are attacked for their attitudes to trans rights, but when a tabloid newspaper castigates her for being a “so-called feminist”, it’s a different matter. She feels cross and indignant, and quite right too.

Like Chakrabarti, I believe that greater equality between women and men is “well worth the stretch” – even if I regard “stretch” as a somewhat inadequate word to describe the bloody fight that lies ahead. Given what we are dealing with right now, however, we’re going to need better, angrier, more wily and more thoughtful books than this one as our rallying cries. Tell us what we don’t know – or what we do, in such a way that it inspires a productive fury. What use is a “provocation” if all it stirs is irritation and fatigue?

• Of Women: In the 21st Century by Shami Chakrabarti is published by Allen Lane (£20). To order a copy for £14.60 go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99