Is creativity gendered?
These are excerpts from Part one of my book: Venus Genius: The Female Prescription for Innovation.
My company INNOVEVE® is about innovation through the feminine lens, leveraging feminine traits like empathy, nurturing, or intuition. I was pitching my FEMimicry® workshop to a company that provides training to CEO’s. As their members are almost exclusively men, I could feel the tension building up in the room as I was going through the feminine traits of my success formula and describing the exercises the participants would do.
I could see the body language of the people in the room, physically withdrawing or nervously shifting on their seats at the sound of the words “empathy”, “intuition”, “nurturing”, or simply “feminine”. I could even perceive the discomfort of the remote attendees just looking at their facial expressions on the screen. At one point, one of the men said: “I don’t really buy into your idea that feminine traits are necessary in innovation. Steve Jobs was an exceptional innovator and he had nothing feminine.”
I breathed, before calmly answering: “Well, actually in the workshop I give Steve Jobs as the perfect example of a feminine trait that’s indispensable for meaningful innovation: intuition.”
This experience taught me to insist on the fact that my message is about the masculine and the feminine, and not about men and women, even if we cannot ignore gender today.
Is creativity Feminine or Masculine?
My theory is that the feminine is more appropriate at the beginning of the innovation process, and the masculine at the end, as the front-end of innovation (discovery phase) is unknown and chaotic, and the back-end (execution phase) is orderly and more predictable.
This is in line with this insightful definition brought to life by author Steven Pressfield in his blog, What is ‘female’? His story idea is that “the female carries the mystery”. What would be a better fit for innovation? Innovation is mystery: you don’t know where to start, and you have no idea of where you’re going.
There are beautiful quotes from his readers, for instance Amber:
Then I understood that it wasn’t female as a gender, but female as the concept. The feminine pull vs the masculine push.
Or Andrea Reima:
The feminine is chaos, the masculine is order. But [“the] female carries the mystery” is a more nuanced understanding of chaos. Well, she does conceive, carry, and give birth, but it is a complete mystery how the conception took place, what is developing in utero, and what specific impact that offspring will have, right?
In one of her famous books, late anthropologist Françoise Héritier describes how Aristotle explains the inherent feminine weakness to its ‘cold’ and ‘humid’ nature, due to the regular blood losses women regularly incur and of which they have no control.
The masculine has historically been considered superior to the feminine, Héritier interprets that it boils down to “controllable vs uncontrollable.”
Lack of control could be considered a weakness in regular life. In innovation it turns into a strength. Indeed, true innovation is by definition uncontrollable, so being comfortable dealing with situations you cannot really control might be a plus for the feminine in innovation.
This supports my hypotheses that:
- the genuine creative work comes from the feminine
- we cannot have successful innovation without a collaboration of the masculine and the feminine energies.
This is fighting years of belief that the masculine is the creative force.
Héritier outlines biologists’ conceptions which, still today, view life as the result of ‘inert’ matter (the ovum) being fertilized by an ‘active’ principle (sperm). She cites the “Grand Dictionnaire Universel du XIXe siècle, 1866–1876:
“Women: what is the intellectual inferiority of the woman due to? […] What does she miss? To produce seeds, meaning ideas […]. No sperm, no seeds, no ideas.”
We will explore in other articles how the feminine and masculine energies influence innovation.
Over the next weeks, I’m going to be sharing excerpts and stories from Part one of my book, Venus Genius in this article series. Venus Genius launched on December 7, 2020 on Amazon, here is the link to buy it: https://lnkd.in/dXbs_WK! If you want to connect, you can reach me here via email: contact@innoveve.com or connect with me on social: www.linkedin.com/in/fabienne-jacquet — https://www.facebook.com/innoveveLLC — @innoveveLLC.
