Imagineering a World Where Women Thrive

My daughter turns 6 in 2020. This is the world she deserves. Will you help co-create it?

Gender inequality is not something I’ve ever given much thought to— after all I’m a single white male in a man’s world and life is pretty comfortable, thank you very much. However, the unexpected birth of my first child late in life is the Universe’s way of opening up an opportunity for learning. So I did a little digging to see what she can expect as a grownup.

I did not like what I found.

The prospects for a young girl post-2020 are dismal — unless women leaders today figure their stuff out and take a stronger stand.

I’m mad as hell that she will be treated as a consumable — like a chicken breast or a rump of steak . Yes, we’ve progressed: modern day ads no longer feature women being beaten by their husbands — as they did in the 50’s, 60’s and 70’s — but we still have a long way to go.

I’m infuriated that it’s likely she will work in the tech industry, where 60% of women are sexually harassed and where funding decisions are at best an ego-driven gamble made by ownership-hungry men.

I don’t like that her access to education may be limited and I certainly don’t want her to join the more than 700 million women globally married or pregnant before they’ve had a chance to enjoy their childhood.

I don’t want her growing up in a country where women cannot own land, or where sexual subjugation is hushed up.

I would never want her rights to travel to be restricted and I’m pretty pissed she won’t earn the same as men doing the exact same job, simply because she doesn’t possess a penis.

I definitely don’t want her to live in any one of the 155 countries that — even in 2016 — have at least one law restricting women’s economic opportunities.

If it ever comes to it, I’d like her to be able to make her own decisions about divorce, abortion, driving and I hope for her sake she’s never gruesomely attacked on social media, simply for standing up for women’s rights.

Sadly — purely because she’s a girl — chances are high that she will experience at least one obstacle no self-respecting dad would ever wish on his daughter.

Good news: there are tons of initiatives underway to address gender imbalances globally, and there has been solid progress since the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing more than two decades ago.

There have been encouraging moves to close gender gaps in wages (California), provide a Universal Basic Income (Finland) for women who provide care to the young and the elderly, laws are being passed to reduce occupational segregation (UK), women’s property and inheritance rights are being protected (Africa) and there are ongoing efforts to combat violence against girls and women (Middle East & Africa). Globally, the more than 15 year old UN Resolution 1325 on Women, Peace and Security is steadily making progress.

Bad news: all of these gender initiatives focus on symptoms rather than causes.

This is mainly because — in every sphere of life — we’ve been conditioned to expect rapid results that match our fast-paced world, rather than lasting solutions.

Symptoms are always easier, quicker, cheaper and more profitable to tackle than causes. The medical and pharma industries often bear testimony to this fact.

The otherwise laudable women empowerment initiatives don’t address root causes, so achieving meaningful, lasting gender equality is unlikely. Some world leaders claim they’ll get there by 2030. Cherie Blair says it will take 118 years before women reach economic parity with men, but I remain skeptical that we will ever achieve gender balance, unless something significant changes.

Why?

The current solutions are simply Band-Aid’s applied to systems that do not serve women’s needs as effectively as men’s needs have been served ever since the Industrial Revolution. In short…

Women are round pegs in square holes, doing the best they can in a system designed to serve men.

The elephant in the room is that these male-constructed systems have run their course and are due for replacement.

Stripping away all the rhetoric, there are two main underlying causes for gender inequality, the first of which is simple and excruciatingly obvious:

• We’re different, by design. Women are endowed with 10 special traits — hardwired into a woman’s brain by evolutionary biology — which are the exact opposite of those hardwired in men;
• Men are not yet willing to scrutinize their conditioning and embrace the female energy within themselves (a huge topic for another post).

For too long we’ve belittled or ignored the extent of our differences and both sexes have adopted learned behavior as coping mechanisms. The reality is that men and women thrive in totally different environments.

Naturally, exceptions abound and there are many examples of women making it big in the world of men, but I cannot accept that my daughter’s only option is to partake in a game stacked against her by design.

“Women who seek to be equal with men lack ambition. Rather than spending a lot of time attacking the current realities of gender inequality, women have an opportunity to create new models that make the older masculine models obsolete.” — Adapted from two quotes by Timothy Leary and Don Beck.

Blueprint for a Thriving Woman’s World

What might these new models look like, in a world where women’s energy is celebrated and allowed to flow and flourish?

A group of successful women tech founders have been imagineering a world where women thrive since early 2015. They have come up with a number of design guidelines for a community, marketplace, business and tech platform built by women for women. I’ve been hugely privileged to spend time with them understanding their philosophies and I’ve summarized what their model of a woman’s world — one I’d love my daughter to grow up in — looks like.

These are my thoughts — not in any way endorsed by the company concerned — and I’ve taken a few liberties here and there. The key point is that I’ve written this from my own (male) perspective, all the while recognizing that there is no right or wrong and I don’t have all the answers. That said, it’s obvious that the currently dominant masculine energy no longer serves our planet. Rather than step aside and admit defeat, it’s time for men to carve out space for women to come forth and blossom into leadership positions — both in business and in government. Continuing to pay lip service and nit-picking over symptoms simply doesn’t cut it.

This is the world my daughter — all daughters — deserve. Women, it’s your role to lead the way and co-create this world. Men, it’s your role to support rather than lead. Are you willing?

How We Define Success

• Happiness and fulfillment are more important pursuits than recognition, success, wealth and power. We pursue a life well-lived, and the consequence just might be recognition, success, wealth and love. We are people who have ambition, but we are not ambitious.
• Community (and global) success is more important than individual success. Today’s world needs more collaboration and nurturing. We need cooperative, collaborative, sustainable societies. We will have succeeded when every country’s budget prioritizes nurturing above war.

Our Community Culture

• Decisions are made from the starting point of trust and abundance, rather than from fear and scarcity. Even decisions that might appear risky — where all possible outcomes have not yet been weighed — are easily made because they resonate with deep inner convictions.
• Facts, logical reasoning and rationality — unless accurately informed by data — take second place to inner wisdom.
• Intuition is highly valued, because it honors the complex, ambiguous, paradoxical, non-linear nature of reality. We know that intuition can be developed like a muscle, so we constantly learn to pay attention to our intuition.
• We yearn for wholeness, while recognizing that this longing is at odds with the separation that most of the rest of the world fosters, albeit unconsciously. This wholeness permeates everything we do. For example, we do not strive for “work-life balance” — we strive for integration of our work life with the rest of our life.
• We recognize that we are not separate from but one with nature and each other. We recognize that everything we do impacts others and has consequences, like a rock thrown into a pond causes ripples far beyond the point of impact.

What We Think About Technology

• The progress our civilization has made with technology is astounding, but the men responsible are now wondering what’s next. The next transformative innovation — which is just around the corner — requires a woman’s touch. Women in tech have only just begun their big move, and by next leap year they will demonstrably prove what’s been missing.
• For starters, technology should be sensitive to how the user is feeling, and adapt accordingly. Technology will recognize emotion, because emotional intelligence is key to empathy.
• Connecting to and collaboration with the right people at the right time is the most valuable asset in a connected society. Synchronicity is always present and current technology has failed to leverage synchronicity. The network effect can be scaled significantly by connecting individuals destined to meet, rather than connecting those who are already connected.
• Artificial Intelligence — driven by Big Data generated primarily by women both East and West, developed and developing — will provide solutions to global challenges from a different level of thinking that created our planet’s current challenges.
• Men chose to spread knowledge through a system of education that many are losing faith in; women choose to spread wisdom using AI and technology.

How We Handle the Delicate Matter of Privacy

• Privacy concerns arise only when users are convinced of their separation and disconnectedness and when they don’t recognize that the concept of ownership is a dying fad.
• A woman’s data is 25% more valuable than a man’s, and she should be able to trade that value if she wishes, fully under her control.
• A woman’s reputation score is more valuable than a man’s credit score, and she should be able to publicly display her score, or make it available on demand.

Our Thoughts on Funding & Finance

• Women have a dysfunctional relationship with money, and this matters because what’s at stake is far bigger than money itself.
• The world’s debt-based economic system is crumbling. Collaborative consumption, partnership society, co-creative gifting, paying-it-forward, buy-one-give-one, peer-to-peer and abundance economics are economic models preferable to profit-driven or shareholder-dictated economies.
• An abundance economy creates thriving lives, rather than gullible, desperate consumers.