Gender neutrality for gender equality

What if all future tasks, products, services and experiences are gender-neutral?

Vishanka Gandhi
Aug 31, 2018 · 2 min read

Among the heavy news about sustainability and technological disruptions, this piece of news stood out for its light nature and potential implications. It is a tiny snippet, almost just a headline by Trend Watching that reports about the luxury brand Chanel releasing makeup products for men. Though reported from opportunities in retail point-of-view, what if this is not just a solution to make men’s desire for makeup mainstream but it is a user-centric solution to achieve gender equality?

It is not about extending to women the provisions that men enjoy but about extending to men the experiences that women have

What this convoluted title means is that women standing up for equal pay and equal opportunities for the exact same tasks that men do is one way to acieve equality through policies and framework. A World Economic Forum report on gender equality highlights that at our current rate, it will take us 217 years to close the economic-gender gap. Iceland has been able to consistently win the top spot in the WEF Gender Equality ranking through top-down legislation, budgeting and quotas. One of them is the welfare state granting parental leave to both parents, which gives men the opportunity to share responsibilities for running a home and family. Can we thus, expedite this gap-closure by instilling empathy and understanding in men by giving them the option to engage with tasks, products, services and experiences that are traditionally labelled as ‘for-women’?

The Guardian shares French comic artist Emma’s illustrations on the ‘mental load’ that women experience in the process of completing household chores. The cartoon authentically captures the challenges of project managing and doing the tasks at home, while at work you’re a delegated project manager or a ‘doer’, so to speak. She captures how men complete the tasks assigned, but that protects them from the ‘mental load’ experienced by the task delegator, and this can be addressed through role-reversal.

Towards a boundary-less world

As the boundaries between work and life, and humans and machines get increasingly blurred, it is important to speak about gender-neutral futures because traditional expectations are now unreal and a real cause for stress and mental illness among women. By encouraging role reversal and shared-experiences, there will be increased empathy and understanding for the challenges that come with any task and thus, more openness towards acknowledgment of responsibilities. It is simply a case of living in their shoes to be able to internalise the nuances and thus truly wanting to create a gender equal society.

Foresight-strategist, speculative designer and writer, focused on technology-driven innovation in the public sector realm.

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