What Is Gender Inequality, Exactly?
Action Speaks Louder than Words
Women will never be treated as equals by talking about it. Attempts to make women equal by strong-armed policy — by fiat — will fail. Always. Why? Political and bureaucratic half-measures will forever ring hollow and gain zero traction because such efforts fly in the face of historical, deeply-rooted, contrary beliefs; cultural memes of ancient origin are impervious to recent toy overtures to redress the wrongs of the status quo, however well-intentioned. The root cause of women being less than men is an ageless perception that men are physically superior to women, ergo, men are superior — period. That is the prevailing meme — like it or not — and it is entrenched on a multi-cultural global scale and will remain so until proven otherwise. There will never be absolute acceptance of women’s equality unless equality is demonstrated on a physical level — the root cause lies there, all other causes are ultimately derivative of women being “less than” physically at some point along the way dating back to the invention of the spear. Now you may think it is impossible to prove physical equality but to believe so is to accept and fortify the validity of the meme that defines the crux of the inequality problem itself: to believe that is tantamount to being part of the problem, not the solution.
Sports, conditioning, warfare, and even education (i.e. paideia) since the time of the ancient Greeks to the present day in virtually all societies have built on the assumption that women are inferior to men: what constitutes “work” today is derivative of this ancient belief because work was physical for the lion’s share of recorded history. This diehard meme will not perish in your lifetime unless there is a definitive, starkly different means to decapitate it once and for all. Unfortunately, “physical” and “mental”, however you wish to pragmatically define these terms, are still joined at the hip on a deep level. Whether you work in a rock quarry or command the C-suite, men are superior and their compensation and relative ease or difficulty in career advancement is steeped in ancient origins — modernity and relevance be damned.
Let’s look at the root of the matter and examine substance — not beliefs, not assumptions. Factually, are women inferior to men physically? The World’s Fittest Humans: Exploring the Limits of Physical and Mental Performance, Training, and Potential presents a new approach to challenge that belief and show — not tell — that women can successfully compete with men physically. One of the major themes of The World’s Fittest Humans is to spawn an invincible meme that serves as a new communication tool for the equality of women. This meme could wield such omnipotent gravity that it forces not just discussion but action because it vividly reveals the disgrace and ignorance of the status quo in profound, unassailable, gut-level fashion.
Why can this catalyze change? Because it throws down the gauntlet with unvarnished authority in a substantive way. Anything less is (more) lip service. Before you can realistically deconstruct the Old Boy’s Network you must first eradicate its root causes in proper sequence: (1) the ageless assumption that women are physically inferior to men and (2) women’s transition from homemakers to the modern workplace since the 1950s is stymied by a glass ceiling in the form of an entrenched Old Boys Network overhang. Plan of Attack: Addressing (1) will accelerate the process of gender-balancing the existing power structure by weakening the prevailing acceptable practice of promoting men over women into higher paying, executive positions — this, however, will not happen in a fortnight. Women now have a majority (~52%) of management positions but 4.6% of CEO positions in S&P 500 companies [numbers here | The Atlantic on Gender Inequality]. Those are the numbers so the problem has been quantified and identified…but how are you going to change them? Having data does not provide the means to changing data and changing policy does not change attitude or beliefs. What has been acceptable needs to become unacceptable on a deep, ethical level; that is the first step to organic, fruitful change and precisely defines what this surprising, counterintuitive approach is about.
What is presented here is not just sizable, but seismic — and timely. And there is a lot at stake. If you strongly desire to change the dynamics and re-write the playbook for women’s equality in the work place, The World’s Fittest Humans provides tangible means to that end with multi-disciplinary scientific teeth behind it [See Table of Contents].
The Idea
Phenomic Games is not just a big idea, but an important, big idea whose time has come. The World’s Fittest Humans, written in the genre of realistic fiction, is about the highest level of human mental and physical performance in history on the world stage in a sport called Phenomic Games. “Phenomic” is a derivation from the biological term “phenome” which is the set of all possible physical manifestations (i.e. phenotypes) of the human genome.
The ancient Greeks, circa 708 BC, created a sport called the pentathlon. The winner of this sport was deemed the fittest man but not necessarily the fittest human because women were not eligible to compete for the same reason women could not attend school — women were (and still are…) inferior to men.
Are you ready to fix it?
Phenomic Games is a two-millennia, radical upgrade to the original pentathlon — the Phenomic 5. A central theme in The World’s Fittest Humans is women competing with men mind-to-mind and pound-for-pound on a level playing field: this rattles the prevailing meme’s cage. Phenomic Games determines by its specific demands the fittest human physical and mental specimens in the history of the world. When the smoke clears a powerful question arises in the audience’s collective hive mind with a clarity never before realized:
If women can compete with men physically, then why can’t they compete with men mentally? So why, exactly, aren’t women treated as equals to men in all walks of life, work and beyond? Society is forced to deal with these questions because Phenomic Games presents for the first time in history prima facie evidence of equality on the physical level, the only level that matters when it comes to materially altering the perception of gender (in)equality.
The extreme diversity of mental and physical approaches to achieve the highest registers of human performance is driven by the collision of the polar-opposing forces of Eastern and Western belief systems. For example, meet Airi Jokinen from Finland, one of the world’s fittest humans and an extremely passionate advocate for gender equality who leads by example:
And meet Jōtara Musashi from Japan, an extraordinary representative of an Eastern approach to mental and physical sublime performance:
Follow developments on Twitter @phenomicgames
About James Autio | jim@phenomicgames.com
