Why Women Are Leading the Global Collaborative Economy
Rachel Botson is a hero of mine; she’s among the leading thought leaders on the collaborative economy and wrote the best-selling book What’s Mine is Yours. Robin Chase, founder of Zip Car and author of the book Peers Inc., I like her style too. Both seem to know all too well that we have to bend technology beyond the conventional rules of the “old economy” sandboxes.
This is the breaking of old rules to better ends, quite literally reinventing capitalism and creating a way forward to not only improve how we live but also to solve some of the world’s greatest ills. Women of the Internet like Robin and Rachel are changing the world and they’re doing it collaboratively by creating new systems and networks.
I watch fearless women changing the world every day in my work to bring the global collaboration platform for the women-based economy, My Swirl ,to life.
Women in technology, education, economics, research, design, banking, and philanthropy aren’t leaning into the same old tables; they’re building totally new ones.
In late 2014, I started to build my own big table in earnest. Something clicked over inside me that said:
“Not only can you do this; you can do what is the biggest thing you can imagine, so stop (as my grandmother, who stole the egg money from the family farm to make her own investments, used to say) fussing around.”
Courage? Maybe. Knowledge? Of course. Resources? I knew I’d find them. Relationships? Check. Right people on the bus? Uh, huh.
As a life-long proponent of all things “women’s leadership”, I worked as a program manager in the 1990’s helping to get more women elected and appointed to California state government. I was mentored and in turn mentored other women. As I got older, I became an accidental tourist of technology. Technology, I came to understand was a powerful tool for transformation.
And although I earned C’s in Algebra and avoided Calculus like the plague, I had a system’s thinking mind and intellectual curiosity. This coupled with an utter frustration of being patted on the head by men every step of my career, who made me feel as though my looks were often more valuable than my mind, pushed me to collaborate with others and learn how to work around “un-workable” systems and environments.
From the halls of the California legislature to today’s venture capital world, men have mostly designed our economic and social constructs. While many well-intentioned men I know have evolved or are evolving past their gender blindness (that men AND women possess), 70% of the time from my experience, they have not evolved. They remain blind to how the world and their sandboxes actually cap the potential of women and girls in ways they cannot fully comprehend.
And that’s okay, because finally women are re-making the world the way we know is possible for all of us. And in a world with diminishing resources and increasing silos of power and influence, we know it’s easier to change what must be changed, and smarter to create what must be created — together.
How did I eventually learn how to be fearless? How did I learn how to trust my vision? How did I stop thinking I needed somebody else’s permission to change the world or validate my own ideas or genius? From other women.
As I pushed into my 30’s and toward my own businesses, including a publishing company during the transition to the digital age, I became enamored with networks. I immersed myself in the art and science of mobile, social, and enterprise technology. I was voracious putting myself in relationship with people who were smarter and more experienced than me.
I looked for women in all forms of technology. At first, they were not easy to find. But I was relentless and eventually I found them — or they found me. That’s how it happens with women. So many social networks and commerce platforms today fail to accept how it is that women want and need to work in the world — how we could do so much more if unlocking our human potential was actually the priority.
Our global, emerging collaboration economy is tailor made for really smart computing at just the right time in our human evolution . I’ve known for some time that mine was the generation that would figure out how to shift our entire global economic sandbox away from isolation and toward collaboration, fueled by climate awareness and war.
I also knew once the human race was connected in a way where there were no more limitations or barriers, everything would change and a whole new world order would emerge. We are running out of all manner of resources that cannot be regenerated.
I imagined a new human network and personal technology that could help people unlock their potential, become more mindful, and incentivize us to collaborate and connect with each other in more relevant, sustainable, and innovation-inducing ways.
It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see that women represent more than half the global population and control the consuming economy. In addition women are the biggest economic drivers of future GDP, job production, and are inherently collaborative (we do circles really well).
Women inherently live more closely to service and living lives from a place of purpose. In the emerging, collaboration economy we not only have a leg up, we are the drivers.
This is what inspired me to create My Swirl. I want women, and ultimately all people, to have technology designed to respond to how we interact, that will serve us, unleash our potential, and enable us to collaborate without boundaries.
When my team and I began to build My Swirl, we knew it would take disrupting many things at once. I wanted it be borderless, self-learning, and smarter than any artificial intelligence contemplated so far. Why build dumb networks that don’t help us be better people and get more done?
So many of us are bending technology and building transformative new ways to collaborate across communities. This is the age of the Internet of Women, the evolution of the web, the Intelligent Web 4.0; this is how the world changes.
