Female future - Building Gender Balanced Business

BY JOSEPHINE GREEN

The industrial age is over, it really is over, it once made sense, but it doesn’t make sense anymore. We just have to look around us. Many of the creations of the industrial era are now less and less relevant and no longer fit for purpose: our schools and education system, our hospitals and health system, our production and consumption system and our very lifestyles. Of course they make less sense now, conditions have changed, and we need to change with them.

So what is holding us back? Well, we are all children of the 20th century. We have 20th century mindsets and 20th century education and training and so, even if the industrial age has had its day, we keep on looking backwards and all too often continue doing what we have always done? And anyway real change isn’t easy. There is no rule book, no instructions of use for the next age. What is easier is to pull the future back to the past, to colonise the future to the past, driven by habit, by vested interests and by fear. This is not good for society in general and not good for women in particular. The 20th century was a man’s world.