What’s in your future?
If you’re a woman, it’s probably not what you’re expecting.
Most women assume they’re on the slow glidepath to equality with their brothers. Their daughters — at the very least, their granddaughters — will surely never need to consider, much less battle, sexual discrimination in school, in the workplace, in government, even at home.
This was our assumption, too, when the Global Business Network, a northern California firm whose core business is producing future scenarios for its international corporate and government clientele, asked us to think about women as a driving force in the next 20 years.
Scenarios are not future predictions so much as opportunities to learn, and with women’s own sense of ourselves having changed so profoundly all over the world, there seemed a lot to learn.
Thus with women pouring into the workplace and expecting to work all their lives, with women moving into non-traditional jobs and rapidly assuming half the places in professional schools, with women’s faces slowly appearing in elective offices from the city hall to the Senate — in short, with one of the greatest social revolutions ever known taking place before our eyes, the questions for GBN’s clients seemed to be: What would an egalitarian future look like? What could GBN’s clients expect in the future from their women colleagues and employees, their customers, their constituents?
We turned first to mainstream futurists and got a jolt. In scholarly or popular books, women were all but invisible, subsumed under a homogeneous, unisex future. If women were mentioned at all, they were noted only as the delivery system for the dreaded Population Bomb, which somehow had to be stopped.
True, after his successful “Megatrends,” futurist John Naisbitt and his partner, Patricia Aburdene, turned their attention toward the other 52 percent of the population in “Megatrends for Women.” It was a relief that someone was paying attention, but that book, like Naomi Wolf’s “Fire with Fire,” worried us because it was so relentlessly upbeat.
We certainly hope the future will be that rosy for women, but what if it isn’t? Hadn’t we better be prepared for the worst too?
We did some calculations. At present rates, women would finally share top corporate management spots equally with men in 2270. At present rates, women would finally be equal in numbers to men in the Congress in 2500. Glidepath? More like a glacier.
These are linear extrapolations. The present rate of change might speed up. But it’s also quite possible that women’s share of power in the boardroom or the Congress will top out at 10 percent and never rise beyond that.
We stepped back and rethought.
What emerged were four scenarios that we think might guide women’s thinking about the future:
First is Backlash. In this scenario, certain trends already apparent in national politics and religion surge to prominence.
As the globe convulses its way through harsh social and economic change, women become scapegoats. Fundamentalist-style repression of women becomes the rule, not the exception. Affirmative action is dismantled; women are systematically dismissed or barred from jobs they once held or from fields in which they were beginning to establish themselves. Widespread violence against women is tolerated (“she must have been asking for it”), and even Western women don a Moslem-style veil by 2007 for their own safety.
Gynecological clinics are policed by state-sanctioned terrorists. An aging population produces an enormous class of pauperized and besieged elderly women, publicly hounded by angry youngsters who believe the schools are poor and they can’t find work because these old women keep sopping up resources and refuse to die.
But another scenario could be A Golden Age of Equality. Great shifts in points of view take place rapidly in this scenario, fostered largely by sciences and technologies known to few in the 1990s but that have transformed popular culture by 2015.
Education — cheap, broadband, intelligent and independent of paper — goes everywhere, as much recreation as training, to stimulate people all their long and healthy lives. Mere dualism (male versus female, organic versus inorganic, regular versus irregular) is dismissed as primitive, if not foolish: Fractal geometry has convinced nearly everyone to abandon simple-minded either/or conceptions of the world. Life on the extended Internet shows the artificial divisions between the sexes for what they are and effectively demolishes them.
Worldwide electronic participatory theater (descended from the multiuser domains, MUDs, or on-line games of the 1990s, but by 2015 much more elaborate, with graphics and artificial intelligence) absorbs millions across international borders as it celebrates multiplicity and cherishes differences.
Scientific research (overlooked in 1996 but accepted in 2015) shows how humans are genetically endowed to prefer making love, not war. Women and men alike work less but do it better and enjoy it more.
In the third scenario, Two Steps Forward, Two Steps Back, the new information technologies help women, but entrenched bureaucracies prevent real social innovation. Interactive, computer-based learning is widely adopted by developing countries that see no choice if they want to be in the information age, but developed countries, gripped by educational and political stagnation, resist all but cosmetic change.
Thanks to advances in contraception and genetic engineering, women are finally free to choose whether they will bear children, but raising a child is so labor-intensive and expensive (an expense that falls entirely on young parents, as community resources shift to the elderly, who have time to lobby and vote) that only the rich can choose more than one child.
Women learn more, but men earn more. Still grappling with the double burden of work and home (plus caring for their seemingly immortal parents and grandparents), most women must step back from major career responsibilities. Thus they fulfill expectations that they aren’t qualified to get to the top. Ever.
Finally, in Separate and Doing Fine, Thanks, women create their own world beyond the mainstream. Recognizing that women’s rights are always secondary to what most men consider the “real” issues, recognizing that most men will talk equality but balk at its reality, many women have psychologically checked out — of the economy, of the day-to-day issues of politics, even out of traditional worship and the arts.
With enough economic resources to declare independence, they have turned to women-run organizations for their needs. They do business, socialize and make love with men, but their main nexus is female. The number of woman-headed households continues to climb steadily. A small but significant proportion of women even withdraw into femmunes, women-only communities, all over the world.
In our book, “The Futures of Women” (Addison-Wesley, $24), we flesh out these scenarios more fully, treating education, worship, work, the arts and relations between the sexes in each. Though our focus is American women, we look at women worldwide, believing that in a global economy the lives of all people are intertwined.
We also look at technology. For example, we expect the development of an artificial womb by 2007. In A Golden Age of Equality its effect is negligible: It’s a toy for the rich. But in Backlash, where even a natural miscarriage thrusts a woman under suspicion of having an abortion (illegal and harshly punished by 2015), growing numbers of women opt for the artificial womb so that a miscarriage won’t attract the wrath of the gynecology police.
In Two Steps Forward, Two Steps Back, however, most women have no more than one child because of the economics of childraising. They choose carefully, taking advantage of genetic engineering and biocomputational look-ahead methods to pick exactly the characteristics of the child they want.
In Separate and Doing Fine, Thanks, most women choose to bear their first child, but they’re too busy to bear more children, and so they use the artificial womb after the first child.
These scenarios may strike you as strange, exhilarating, shocking, even repugnant. But they aren’t implausible. They grow out of a systematic analysis of predetermined elements, driving forces and trends, the same tools long-range planners use in business.
Scenarios begin with those most concrete of entities, numbers: people and their ages, the number of children they have, their income or how many years they spend in school, all the painstaking work of census takers and demographers.
These numbers are some of the predetermined elements that scenario creators consider (though even these are subject to unforeseeable change: A major war or a virulent disease could wipe out much of a generation).
For example, we know that, barring a catastrophe, the age profile of the developed world will change by 2015 from a typical pyramid, with many youngsters representing the bottom of the pyramid and a handful of old people at the pyramid’s peak, to a kind of cylinder, where people over 60 will be as numerous as people under 15. Of those over 60, two out of three will be women.
The globalization of the economy and information and biological technologies are some of the driving forces to consider, but what shape will they take?
Trends — some long-term, some short — make the scenarist ask which trends might persist and which ones might fizzle.
For instance, a recent in-depth poll says that American teenage boys and girls hold very different views of their future. Most boys interviewed not only longed for a return to the ’50s (Dad the breadwinner and Mom at home looking after the children) but also hoped to live such a life themselves, though they grudgingly conceded that they probably couldn’t stop their wives from working outside the home.
On the contrary, most girls expected to have both a career and family and were sanguine about raising a child without a husband if necessary.
Flash forward 20 years. Will the boys have changed their minds? Will the girls? Can people with such widely different expectations have anything to say to each other, much less create stable partnerships? Marry?
A century ago, Western women began reducing the number of children they bore, and this is now beginning to occur elsewhere. A long-term trend in the West, tellingly linked to increased education for women — will it be long-term elsewhere too?
What about the small but significant trend toward childbirth without marriage, an international phenomenon?
Some researchers blame this on lack of jobs among working-class men (who cannot establish a traditional household without the job to support it), but other researchers show evidence that single motherhood is linked to women’s growing economic independence. (Think of those American teenagers.) Which is it? And will it continue?
In 1994, for the first time, women-owned businesses in the United States provided more jobs than the Fortune 500 firms. While the big firms continue to downsize, nimble little women-owned firms are one of the most vibrant parts of the American economy.
The art of scenario creation comes in imagining the different ways that predetermined elements, driving forces and trends might interact. Combine these with a sensitivity to possible trends that haven’t yet announced themselves loudly, and with the impact of technological innovations poised to enter and possibly transform our lives. Mix and bake.
The question is, So what? As entertaining (or chilling) as these scenarios might be, what’s the point of the exercise?
Scenarios are not only an opportunity to learn but also offer a remarkable tool for beginning non-threatening discussions on issues of women and change.
In their full detail, scenarios allow us to suspend disbelief and participate momentarily in the future. They’re a kind of virtual reality in text that lets us ask: What can I do to bring about — or prevent — such a future? How do I cope if it does happen? Above all, what positive steps can I take every day right now to ensure that the future I want for myself and my children comes about?
Though we’ve worked diligently on them, our scenarios are incomplete, works-in-progress. They are nothing more or less than invitations for everyone to imagine better, more plausible or more desirable futures for women.
