Womankind

Invisible Women, which I discovered thanks to D, is a book that I have been recommending to as many people as I can because of how enlightening it was. Though the extension of the book title is “exposing data bias in a world designed for men”, it actually goes well beyond that and brilliantly articulates the challenges that women face at the workplace, in public spaces, their everyday lives, and how the world works differently for them in the many, many things that men take for granted.

In another powerful book that I read recently, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, Shoshana Zuboff eloquently explains how the latest form of capitalism has gone rogue and is now well on its way to influencing human behaviour and actions at industrial scale. By extension, this is a systematic assault on the concept of free will, all part of a relentless bid for more money, power and control. While industrial capitalism exploited nature, surveillance capitalism is doing the same to human nature.

What’s the connection? To begin with, they are both momentous books written by female authors. They both focus on data as well – one about its lack, and the other about its abundance. But it goes further. Shoshana Zuboff writes about surveillance capitalism’s unbridled lust for power, money and control. Caroline Criado-Pérez points out how including women in decision-making actually makes more economic sense. That got me thinking on how the world might have been a different place if women were running it. At some point, evolution got the male of the species to be the aggressive hunter and the female to be the nurturer and the caregiver. Zoom forward, and the power structures that developed thence ensured that men made a world that played by their rules and values.

What if the roles were reversed? Would our society be optimised for moral values, empathy and compassion? One could indeed argue that there’s a Sandberg for every Thunberg, and a different world would have created a share of alpha females who are no better than the male versions in charge now. But on this, I’m not playing my cynical self. I genuinely believe that women would work more diligently towards prosperity over growth and dignity over domination. In short, they would have considered our existence as an infinite game that focuses on continuing the play rather than a finite one that’s all about winning.

Evolution did play its hand and got us to develop socio-culturally defined hierarchies and roles that are unfortunately not gender agnostic, but as a species, we’re the first with the faculties required to face evolution and challenge determinism. It’s about time that half the species played its role in things that affect humanity. After all, sex is only an evolutionary manifestation, it should not define destiny.