In the past several months, the issue of ensuring a truly equal future for women in society has risen up the agenda of global challenges – whilst at the same time indicators suggest the actual gap is growing globally. From harassment and #metoo to #timesup and the rights to equal pay and equal access in education, the workplace, and the boardroom, women have been succeeding in spotlighting the issues and arguing for their rights.  So, as we look to the future, some fundamental questions arise: What is the future of women?  Are women’s futures different from men’s futures?  How do we proceed in the coming years to embed a gender equality mindset while accounting for the unique challenges women face? 

This article draws on insights from our recent book – The Future Reinvented – Reimagining, Life, Society and Business to explore how business and society can adjust to ensure a more positive future for women, focusing on what we consider to be critical agenda issues. We conclude with our advice and dreams for the future of women.

Areas which could benefit significantly from the increased participation of women

As we look to the forces shaping our world, it is clear that society as a whole could benefit significantly from the increased participation of women in the future of technology development, elected governmental roles, and higher education. For example, we need to better understand that an algorithm can be racist or sexist before integrating artificial intelligence (AI) into our social systems and institutions. The new book by Dr. Safiya Umoja Noble, Algorithms of Oppression, is a great example of the kind of critical thinking about its broader social implications that the technology sector needs. 

An increased participation of women in technology development could contribute significantly to the creation of more female-oriented products. For example, Natural Cycles, created by a woman, is an effective contraceptive app that gives women a natural choice over family planning, without the hormonal side effects of the pill. Many other clever technological solutions could be developed with an increased participation of women in technology.

If automated systems, including those powered by AI, are representations of those who created them, then maybe those systems need to represent the gender split we see in society. More women in fields such as programming machine learning could help to create a gender balance within our intelligent technologies. 

The evolving role of women in the workplace

One view on the evolving role of women in the workplace is that men’s role is also evolving.  Work in general is changing because of the different economic and technological drivers in place, for example remote and gig working.  The evolution of work has cross-gender impacts.  Nations should look to follow Iceland’s fair pay example and eliminate the idea that women and men at work deserve different treatment in the first place.

In some domains and countries, the evolving role of women in the workplace is engendering a more confident and empowering attitude. Women are taking control of their own workplace situations and actively tackling inequalities. A variety of studies suggest that women’s confidence when asking for a raise or a promotion is growing year by year. Women are realizing that the first step to change starts from within and these small changes can have a major impact on their work environment.

The future, as currently envisaged by many, depicts a world where much of the work that goes into creating products and services will be automated. Hence, what we offer our customers and clients could become increasingly commoditized, so our new propositions will need to focus on something different. Being more human and focusing on the relationship between businesses and customers could become a critical differentiator. Hence, the focus might shift to building propositions on a foundation of competences and values that are typically thought of as feminine –  such as collaboration, relationship development, and empathy. Such an approach could help firms create the competitive advantage they need in the future. The role of women across business could become increasingly crucial in leading the culture change required to underpin the development of new propositions.

Significant challenges facing women professionals in the years to come

Women professionals face the continuing challenge of leading a household and maintaining a career.  Societal pressure to “have it all,” however, may be taking a new shape. Women from the millennial generation have not married or reproduced at the same levels as their predecessors. Hence, a woman’s versatile balancing act across various personal and professional roles in the future may not necessarily be due to motherhood, but rather, a choice made for personal fulfillment.

Women professionals face the challenge of establishing a new relationship with the men in their lives. Men, as working colleagues or as relationship partners are used to the stereotypical idea of providing higher economic support and assuming leadership roles. The challenge now is to create new ways of relating to each other based on an authentic mutual partnership.

Cultural norms vary significantly across the world, but evidence on the rise of women in business and more prominent in society is clear in Asia, for example. And yet, even in the developed world, we still see institutional discrimination. The cultural and deep-rooted context for discrimination is likely to take some time to clear and is only likely to change through a combination of active campaigning, legislative change, behavioural modification, and generational trends.  

Will the man-woman divide persist in the next decade? 

The gap is a big one. In November 2017, The World Economic forum estimated that, at current rates, it will take 217 years to close the gap on pay and employment opportunities. Sadly, this estimate has risen by 47 years over figure calculated a year earlier. They also estimate that the broader gender gap – that takes account of factors such as healthcare, education, and participation in politics – has risen from 83 to 100 years over that same period.

If we define “the man-woman divide” as sexual dimorphism, e.g. that our differences extend beyond just our physical organs, then certainly it seems likely that this will continue. The man-woman divide will probably persist, although there is though some concern that male fertility in the West could be threatened by hormonal disruptions in the food chain and our natural ecosystems. However, the roles of each of the genders might become more similar. There could be less men or women-oriented services, products or roles. This might be the beginning of the next era where, in 20 years from now, the man woman divide might become much less perceptible.

As with many norms that become unacceptable as our collective sense of right and wrong evolves, from one perspective, a gradual erosion of alpha male domination looks set to take place. Society through the empowerment of women, supported by the increasing enlightenment among men, could help to accelerate the agenda for equality, aided by the power of technologies such as social media as platforms for campaigning and “outing unacceptable practices”. At another level, the dominance of strong male leaders of major economies such as Donald Trump, Xi Jinping, and Vladimir Putin, suggests that traditional male hierarchies may be hard to dislodge.

Women’s ability to manage risks and challenges

Is society responsible for preparing women for the risks and challenges of the future?  How should we help them respond to economic shocks, the failure of social institutions, and the challenge of adapting to the automation of work — potentially displacing many jobs?  Perhaps the best way to do this is to increase the participation in and completion of post-secondary education by women worldwide.

It has been thought that men are more prone to taking risks and overcoming challenges than women. Psychological research has debunked this myth and now we know that these differences depend of the type of risky behaviors we include in the research questionnaires. It is not that one gender is more prone to risk taking than the other. Rather, we are all capable of developing these capacities depending on the experiences we have had and the situations we face.

Are there innate abilities that women have that can be nurtured through education, in work training, and coaching? Could these help raise women’s awareness of their own capabilities, whilst also allowing them to demonstrate competence in managing risks and challenges in leadership positions?  

Advice to women on tackling the future

In a world increasingly dominated by the hype and reality of technology, women need to adjust their expectations of this growing force in society.  Even though we encounter abundant conventional wisdom that says humans will be replaced by technology, this is a line pushed by the technoprogressives with a vested interest, and women in particular shouldn’t fall for it. The future, especially one highly imbued with AI, needs humanity, and especially women, more than ever.

The future is waiting for women to take on any leadership role where they feel they can contribute to society. The world as we know it is changing, and now is the time to evolve a new generation with higher expectations of what women can do. The critical challenge here is for women to believe in themselves and encourage other women to do so as well.

The key here is for women to focus on maximizing their potential as women. This means celebrating their natural skills and sense of the importance of relationships, empathy, collaboration, and caring. Ultimately these are the traits that could make the difference between a dystopian technology enabled world and a very human future.

Achievements in the progress of women on the planet we hope to be talking about in five years’ time

In five years we hope to see better legislation to protect women’s health and access to education.  Hopefully more countries will adopt gender-blind wage policies like Iceland.  Also, we hope to see greater priority placed on bringing maternal and infant mortality rates down to near zero globally within five years, using strategies that empower women and make best use of local knowledge. 

In five years, we truly hope that we will finally have zero tolerance of female genital mutilation globally. We hope that all women in the world have full access to education. And that women participate in at least half of the leadership roles in the corporate and political sectors.

Across the next set of electoral cycles it would be a pleasant surprise if half of all the developed world’s major democracies were led by a woman and if the supporting legislatures were gender balanced.

Author Bios

The authors are futurists with Fast Future — a professional foresight firm specializing in delivering keynote speeches, executive education, research, and consulting on the emerging future and the impacts of change for global clients. Fast Future publishes books from leading future thinkers around the world, exploring how developments such as AI, robotics, exponential technologies, and disruptive thinking could impact individuals, societies, businesses, and governments and create the trillion-dollar sectors of the future. Fast Future has a particular focus on ensuring these advances are harnessed to unleash individual potential and enable a very human future. See: www.fastfuture.com

Rohit Talwar is a global futurist, award-winning keynote speaker, author, and the CEO of Fast Future. His prime focus is on helping clients understand and shape the emerging future by putting people at the center of the agenda. Rohit is the co-author of Designing Your Future, lead editor and a contributing author for The Future of Business, and editor of Technology vs. Humanity. He is a co-editor and contributor for the recently published Beyond Genuine Stupidity – Ensuring AI Serves Humanity and The Future Reinvented – Reimagining Life, Society, and Business, and two forthcoming books — Unleashing Human Potential – The Future of AI in Business, and 50:50 – Scenarios for the Next 50 Years.

Steve Wells is an experienced strategist, keynote speaker, futures analyst, partnership working practitioner, and the COO of Fast Future. He has a particular interest in helping clients anticipate and respond to the disruptive bursts of technological possibility that are shaping the emerging future. Steve is a contributor to the recently published Beyond Genuine Stupidity – Ensuring AI Serves Humanity and The Future Reinvented – Reimagining Life, Society, and Business, co-editor of The Future of Business, and Technology vs. Humanity. He is a co-editor and contributor to two forthcoming books on Unleashing Human Potential – The Future of AI in Business, and 50:50 – Scenarios for the Next 50 Years.

Alexandra Whittington is a futurist, writer, Foresight Director of Fast Future, and a faculty member on the Futures program at the University of Houston. She has a particular expertise in future visioning and scenario planning. Alexandra is a contributor to The Future of Business, the recently published Beyond Genuine Stupidity – Ensuring AI Serves Humanity and The Future Reinvented – Reimagining Life, Society, and Business. She is also a co-editor and contributor for forthcoming books on Unleashing Human Potential – The Future of AI in Business, and 50:50 – Scenarios for the Next 50 Years.

April Koury is a foresight researcher, writer, and the Publishing Director of Fast Future. She has worked on a range of foresight initiatives including society and media in 2020, emerging economies, and the future of travel, tourism, and transportation. April is a contributor to the recently published Beyond Genuine Stupidity – Ensuring AI Serves Humanity and The Future Reinvented – Reimagining Life, Society, and Business and a co-editor of The Future of Business, and Technology vs. Humanity. She is a co-editor and contributor to two forthcoming books on Unleashing Human Potential – The Future of AI in Business, and 50:50 – Scenarios for the Next 50 Years.

Helena Calle is a researcher at Fast Future.  She is a recent graduate from the MSc. program in Educational Neuroscience at Birkbeck, University of London, and has eight years of international experience as a teacher, teacher trainer, pedagogic coordinator, and education consultant. Helena coordinates Fast Future’s research on the future of learning.

Image: https://pixabay.com/images/id-2017435/ by geralt

by Tracey Follows, Founder/Director of the Female Futures Bureau

Jennifer Gidley is a former President of the World Futures Studies Federation (2009–2017), a UNESCO and UN partner and global peak body for futures studies scholarship, she led a network of hundreds of world leading futures scholars and researchers from around the globe. An adjunct Professor at the Institute for Sustainable Futures, UTS in Sydney, futurist, author, psychologist and educator, Jennifer is a prolific author of dozens of academic papers, serves on several academic boards, and most recently authored Postformal Education: A Philosophy for Complex Futures (Springer, 2016) & The Future: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford, 2017). 

Tracey: I spoke to Jennifer about her perspective on Female Futures.

One of the issues we discuss a lot at The Female Futures Bureau is why more female futurists don’t have a higher profile.  And Jennifer agrees that it’s not because they aren’t around:

“I actually believe there are a large number of female futurists globally, and probably always have been. I would suggest that there are as many women involved in futures studies and foresight work as there are men…”

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However, during this time period, having been immersed many different components of therapeutic development and commercialization, one thing has always bothered me: a wide array of promising research never makes it off the bench to see the translational light of day, and gets lost in the historical scientific archives.

I always believed that scientific progress happened in a very linear narrative, with each new discovery supporting the next, resulting ultimately in an eventual stairway of scientific enlightenment.

What the reality turned out to be was much more of a fragmented, research “evolutionary tree”, with dozens of potential pathways, only very few branches of which ever resulted in scientific maturity, and not always the most fruitful ones by any means.

The premature extinction of these promising discovery pathways were the result of a variety of factors, including, but not limited to, funding priorities, competing industrial interests, “out of vogue” concepts, lack of intellectual properties, non-existent regulatory models, conflicted legislative initiatives, and even religious implications.

In 2016, as in previous years, we continue to see these “valleys of death” swallow up pathways of scientific possibility, with few popular segments attracting the majority of attention and support.

The preponderance of resources focused on the somatic mutation model of carcinogenesis, despite an endless range of research highlighting that the disease is extremely heterogenic and rarely ever follows such a clonal model, is one example that continues to be inappropriately manifested in the oncology system, decades into the “war on cancer”.

On a similar plane, the jettisoning of most studies of the biophysical aspects of human genetics, despite the gross incompleteness offered by the central dogma to explain higher biological form and function, is another example that has become all too pervasive in the research community.

And then there are the areas of human consciousness, memory, and information processing / storage, where in many ways we are still operating in the dark ages, with materialists and dualists battling it out for centuries.

One topic that I have written quite a bit about is that of death, specifically that of the death of the human brain — http://www.singularityweblog.com/is-death-reversible/

While I am a staunch supporter and advocate of the life-extension / anti-aging movement, I am equally vocal about our need to develop technologies, products, and services that can actually reverse our ultimate transition between the living and dead states, a transition that occurs annually for 60 million humans around the globe.

Death, however, is unfortunately seen by many as a natural, biological progression for human beings, and in many circles, deemed an unnecessary area of scientific research and exploration.

I beg to differ.

Far too often, death arrives too early and too unexpectedly for many of us and our loved ones. And the best modern medicine has to offer today is “Sorry. There is nothing else we can do.”

But what if there was?

There are a variety of species across the natural world that are capable of regenerating and repairing themselves from forms of severe CNS damage that bring them to the transitional grey zone between life and death. Along the evolutionary timeline however, this ability gradually disappeared hundreds of millions of years ago and does not manifest in higher species.

Now, in the 21st century, with the convergence of the disciplines of regenerative biology, cognitive neuroscience, and clinical resuscitation, we may finally be poised to take back these capabilities for humans.

Over the years, clinical science has focused heavily on preventing such life and death transitions and made some initial progress with suspended animation technologies, such as therapeutic hypothermia. But once we transition through the brain death window, currently defined by the medical establishment as “irreversible” (per the 1968 Ad Hoc Committee of the Harvard Medical School definition), we are technically no longer alive.

To add insult to injury, a human can be declared dead, even while our bodies can still circulate blood, digest food, excrete waste, balance hormones, grow, sexually mature, heal wounds, spike a fever, and gestate and deliver a baby. It is even acknowledged by thought leaders that recently brain dead humans still may have residual blood flow and electrical nests of activity in their brains, just not enough to allow for an integrated functioning of the organism as a whole.

Several prominent cases in the media over the past few years have further served to highlight the current situation, as well as the substantial anatomical and functional differences between the state known as brain death, and other severe disorders of consciousness, such as coma, and the vegetative and minimally conscious states.

It is now time to take the necessary steps to provide new possibilities of hope, in order to counter the pain, sorrow, and grief that is all too pervasive in the world when we experience a loved one’s unexpected or untimely death, due to lesions which might be potentially reversible with the application of promising neuro-regeneration and neuro-reanimation technologies and therapies.

It is time to undertake the required research, based on 2016 technological knowledge, in order to bring about such transformational change.

My name is Ira S. Pastor and I am the CEO of the biotechnology company Bioquark Inc.

Welcome to the unveiling of the Reanima project.

Reanima Video

“March 8 is International Women’s Day, and to mark the occasion we’ve put together a list of just a small sample of women currently doing groundbreaking work in the fields of science and tech.”

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“The SpaceX CEO’s answer was encouraging.”

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“The finding: There’s little correlation between a group’s collective intelligence and the IQs of its individual members. But if a group includes more women, its collective intelligence rises.”

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“Plenty of forward-thinking companies have innovation divisions that try and predict the future, disrupt old models, and develop cutting-edge products. They don’t nest those divisions inside their human resources departments. So why shouldn’t gender diversity efforts be a part of corporate innovation?”

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“Celebrating the achievements of women in science, technology, engineering and maths”

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