My younger son, Horatio, has grown up in a home with two mothers so I thought he’d be way ahead when it came to seeing women as powerful, equal figures to the men in his life.
Then he started school and my illusions were shattered.
No matter what he’d learned at home, he was now socializing in a world that was telling him in a thousand tiny ways that the female of the species is lesser. Suddenly pink was a ‘girly’ colour. Muscles and strength were the key indicators of his maleness. Boys were ‘better’.
I’m not too worried about him. You don’t live with two working mothers and end up an adult man who thinks women aren’t capable and talented.
But for me, the ideas that Horatio is encountering out in the world are at the heart of the challenge facing us if we truly aspire to working like the women we are. To do so, we must shift our perception of the female away from distortions that have been centuries in the making and still hold much sway. We must value feminine power every bit as much as masculine, instead of sidelining or crushing it.
Right now, though, girls are still learning from a very young age that they are inferior. Why else would those as young as six be less likely to think women are intellectually brilliant? Or be more reluctant to take part in games for ‘clever’ kids?
We are weighing down our daughters with a legacy of inferiority, crippling fear of failure and unwillingness to take risks in order to avoid making mistakes. Girls who are so anxious to achieve academically that they feel a heavy weight of responsibility from a very young age.
They are also living in a world that is telling them, perhaps more powerfully than ever before because of the proliferation of technology, that their primary power is their physical appearance – not intellectual or emotional strength. Then they end up in a working culture they have to fight against: whether they want to reach the top or simply do a job that is currently undervalued because it’s ‘women’s work’. Many will also, one day, combine this with doing the majority of care for their children. No wonder they are stressed and anxious.
Meanwhile the young men in our lives are suffering too: performing less well in education than girls, less likely to crack their tough façade by admitting a mental-health problem, more likely to commit suicide. Many also sacrifice family life in favour of work and crush the caring and intuitive aspects of their nature.
To raise young men up, we must teach them that achieving personally by being fully engaged in their families is every bit as worthy as professional success. We must give them a more complex understanding of masculinity than tough super-heroes, while ensuring they do not feel demonized for their masculinity.
To raise young women up, we must teach them that they are as strong, capable and courageous as our sons; we must allow them to be as competitive and ambitious as boys; we must show them that they are allowed to mess up, and dress down, as much as boys are.
This is what will create more equality between young men and women. And allow women to claim not just their rightful share of our working world in the future, but also of the very creation of the future itself.
Power will lie in technology in years to come but women are not yet equally responsible for creating it. If we want the future to be more equal, we must make technology that is equal – not created in the likes of the men currently developing it.
Economics intimately affects our daily lives, too, but here as well women are under-represented. Just one in four students applying to study the subject at university is female and men still largely formulate economic policy.
To solve all this, we must think carefully about the messages we are sending our daughters and encourage them not to shy away from ‘hard’ topics, like economics or science, at school, to want to go into these industries and take guardianship of decisions in the interests of other women.
We must raise them to apply for mortgages as adults, pay for dinner on a date, ask for a pay rise, and not leave the men in their lives to manage household finances while they unload the washing-machine. Then women will step up and take responsibility in the public world of money in the same way that we’re asking men to do in the private world of care.
Because when men and women become equal partners in life as well as work, we will create a different kind of world: one in which the masculine and the feminine are merged to become even stronger together than they are apart.
And I genuinely feel hopeful that this is going to happen.
We cannot continue as we are. Our systems, values and behaviours are at breaking point, and ordinary men and women are expressing their dissatisfaction with the status quo more and more frequently.
Working like a woman is not about replacing an alpha system with an exclusively feminine one. It’s about learning to value the power of feminine characteristics, embracing them in the way we work and blending the best of both genders to make us all more productive, powerful and in harmony.
It will create a kinder, more freeing and collaborative future for us all. It is not simply the way for women to reclaim their power. It’s a way for all of us to do so.
Men and women have as much to gain as each other from creating radical change in the way we work and live.
This is not us or them. This is we.