Guest Blog from Roel van Rijsewijk, Deloitte, Netherlands

(Roel was an invited guest speaker at ServiceNow’s EMEA Partner Summit that took place on 6-7th March 2018)

As a man with four daughters, I have an acute interest in the future of females in the workplace and their welfare in the world that we are now building. You would hope that I would have had that same interest if I had no female children – and that’s a real future possibility for people of all genders on the road ahead.

So please allow me to convince you of why I think the world is changing for the better and explain how tech-enabled female energy can now power us forward.

We are currently going through a wide-ranging global realisation that humanity needs to achieve a new level of equality, inclusivity and diversity. The result of this new (although obviously too late in the day) understanding is that we are now becoming a connected and information-empowered global tribe of individuals.

The humans populating this global tribe exist in a world where everything is connected and nobody is in charge. Yet, at the same time, everybody is in charge.

The power of information is available to everyone and this core equality is fundamental to democratising freedom for everyone, irrespective of gender, race, religion, learning ability and all other differentiating factors that we use to segregate humanity.

Feminism epiphany

In the new global village, men understand that feminism is not about females – it is about equality between people of all genders. As the new global tribe starts to explore its world, we must now work to understand where our similarities can make us better and where our differences can make us stronger.

We know that boys play is competitive and based upon hierarchies; playing with toys is about ownership based on monopolisation. Girls play is much more collaborative, based on sharing and the spoken opening ‘shall we?’ inside groups.

I use the word differences even in this time of burgeoning equality for a reason. The important thing to remember is that there is a difference between the two sexes and this lies in the levels of two different types of energy. There is female energy and there is male energy and we all have a combination of both in varying degrees (women are, generally speaking, more in tune with their female energy than men).

What we need to realise now is what energies we have and how we can bring them forward. As a caveat here, let me also say that I mean gender-based energy in the spiritual sense, not as any kind of attempt to draw any new lines where we so desperately need to break down old divisions and empower the new tribe.

Atari generation

The disparity that exists in technology-related gender balance has an easily identifiable history. In the ‘60s and ‘70s we had a roughly equal balance of students going into computer science… but it all dropped off in the 1980s.

If you think about weaving a piece of intricate software code together, that’s not a particularly stereotypical masculine thing to do, so it could have developed into a female-dominated field. The problem was that in the 1980s, we saw big computer firms run ads for their machines (and indeed for employment) that were predominantly targeted at males.

The Atari generation wasn’t all to blame, but this was a significant factor.

Female energy has been repressed for thousands of years and this has obviously had an impact on society. But, we are at the knee of the curve in the third industrial revolution and I believe that it is only when we can combine both technology and female energy that we can move forward.

Cyber-libertarian-feminist

I describe myself as an Internet hippie that wants to help democratise elements of information such as blockchain. The dot com era has led to a few dominant platforms that corral and manage information far too much. As a cyber-libertarian-feminist I can see a time just ahead when information is opened up. I also label myself as a new-age digital anarchist, but that’s for another presentation.

If you look at the network effect it works best if everyone is working on the same platform. Dot com era platforms (and we do not need to mention popular social technologies or other dominant search engines) have never served to democratise information for everybody as the new generation will.

What we need is to break down generalised stereotypes and cross fertilise the energy sources … but at the same time keep an understanding of the fact that there are indeed differences.

This means we will need to capitalise on differences where we can and use them to create a more diverse, more equal, more fair future. The future is a place where tech-enabled female energy can flourish and we males have a responsibility to help fuel and channel those energy streams as they now grow.