The Futures of Women: Scenarios for the 21st Century [Paperback]

Each of the four futures has been extrapolated to provide a vision into "what might happen if" scenarios entitled Backlash; The Golden Age of Equality; Two Steps Forward, Two Steps Back; and Separate and Doing Fine, Thanks! As we read the scenarios we bring personal view points to whether this or that envisioned future will be predominant. What matters to the scenario process, however, is that we expand our view of what is possible as we read them and allow the process of thought to promote individual understanding.

Innovation requires that we expand our understanding of what is possible and to "see" problems, opportunities and solutions before others see them. Perhaps scenarios are most effective as development tools in the innovation process rather than the divining rod for innovative ideas. The simple act of gathering the material to use for imagining variations of what the future may hold drives one of its most important benefits. In understanding where we are and what could happen through sifting evidence of our culture and time, a foreshadowing of who we might become is unearthed within several possible futures. The storytelling in the scenario weaving process then provides the context for relationships between ideas that may lead us to imagining futures whose paths are trajectories that we can either access or build towards.

The Futures of Women: Scenarios for the 21st Century will evoke strong, personal reactions from its readers. Embrace your past, your present and the thoughts exemplified in this book to create OUR future.

PAMELA MCCORDUCK is the author of Machines Who Think and The Fifth Generation.

NANCY RAMSEY is a former legislative director to Senator John Kerry and co-author of Nuclear Weapons Decision-Making.

The Futures of Women began as a project for the clients of Global Business Network (GBN), Emeryville, California. The central business of GBN is the planning and creation of scenarios for corporate, government, and nongovernment long-range planners. The principals of GBN are encapsulated in the Shell Oil team that in 1968 predicted both the sharp rise in oil prices and in the early 1970's the fall of the Soviet Union. GBN claims not to have predicted either event. Rather, "they examined the predetermined elements and identified what they viewed as the driving forces." (p. xi) In 1993, from October through December, GBN gathered in two meetings to examine facts and trends, destroy complacency, and predicate thoughts about the roles of women in the next twenty years-a generation into the future. The two conferences, on-line and face-to-face, generated many novel ideas, one of which is the fact that "most women are years ahead of most men in thinking about changing roles. Most men are just now beginning to [admit] to women, 'You really mean it.' Many men are confused; some are resentful. They consider themselves decent and good and are pained to be perceived as obstacles. They also realize that the privileges their sex enjoyed for centuries are threatened with extinction." (p. xiii) The on-line conference produced so many emotional stymies that as a model of the real world, it is clear that unfulfilled emotional business will play a role in the real future. "The on-line conference was evidence that men especially are anguished about pending changes....McCorduck had never seen so much raw emotion on the computer screen. The face-to-face meeting, on the other hand, provided exhilarating evidence that women and men working as respectful partners can envisage a world that meets, even exceeds, our rosiest expectations." (pp. xiv-xv)

Introduction

Main Idea: The Reality of the Present--Women Are Not Achieving Equality. "Statistics collected by the United Nations since 1975 show that in most economic respects, things are getting worse, not better for most women in the world. (p. 320) In 1970, the top managers of major American Corporations were 99 % male. Twenty years later, only 95% of top mangers were men. At this rate, it will be the year 2270 before women and men are equally likely to be top managers of major corporations. In Congress, were 6 % of elected representatives in the mid-1990s, a tripling of the 2% they were in 1950. At this rate, Congress will achieve equality between men and women by the year 2500. The percentage of high-level women may remain frozen forever at under 10% in business and in politics....Women generally avoid thinking about these numbers and the difficulties they represent because nobody has the stomach for confrontation and battle, or for large-scale organizing efforts, the traditional means of achieving what women want and of preserving what they have. (pp. 9-10) Should this trend continue into the future, we might think of it as a more subtle form of Backlash." (p. 320) Main Idea: The Wish List of Problems for Desired Equality. In an upbeat response, women from all over the world identified a list of problems common to them: they desire autonomy over their own bodies, they desire health and education, they desire equality in the workplace, they desire freedom from violence, and they desire a share of political and economic power. "All over the world, women will recognize an internal change in themselves, and they are preparing to seize...their own futures.... Women's transformed view of themselves, combined with other global seismic shifts-the restructuring economy and the rapid spread of information technology-means that this is a very new future we all face."(p. 5) "If the genuinely powerful, nearly all of them men, view the world as a zero-sum game, convinced that the gains of others must be their loss, then even those modest but real advances that women have made toward equality in the last few decades of the twentieth century seem to be a startling threat to the powerful. (p. 10) Main Idea--Future Implications: With No Common Standard of Law, Women Will "Go Backward" in Equality. Moreover, the Western notion of individual rights, protected by national law and international action, is being ferociously resisted as an international norm. With no common standard of law, and with nations powerless to enforce that standard if it existed, women go backward." (p. 17) The book offers four possible views of the future world in the form of four scenarios: (1) Backlash; (2) A Golden Age of Equality; (3) Two Steps Forward, Two Steps Back; and (4) Separate and Doing Fine, Thanks! Each scenario is written as a blend of description, novel, and biography-graphic, ripping with emotional truths of the abuse of women and of the fundamental resistance to the changing roles of women, and intellectually connected with both history and future. One must read carefully to discern the thin line, where real events of the late twentieth century end and the fiction of a possible future begins. Contemporary abuses against women throughout the world, in every culture, leap out of the pages to enlighten the reader of the collaborative, collusive containment of women in the culturally and worldly traditional roles-both metaphoric and real-of mother, of housewife, of "harlot," and of "slave" in restricted positions of responsibility and/or of salary in the western corporate world and in the primeval third world countries sans technology. The common thread that is embedded in and generates each scenario is the state of the global economy and the political and philosophical factions that govern a country or rule a company. "In one of our scenarios, individual rights generally prevail and the global economy grows robustly. Result: 'A Golden Age of Equality.' In another scenario, the rights of groups-religious, political, tribal, or national-tend to prevail over individual rights, and the economy grows robustly: 'Separate and Doing Fine, Thanks!' When individual rights prevail over group rights, but the global economy is depressed, the scenario is 'Two Steps Forward, Two Steps back.' In another scenario, group rights prevail over individual rights, but the global economy is depressed, resulting in 'Backlash.'" (p. 21) In each scenario the same predetermined elements play a role-demographics and technology for two-but the plot line differs in each scenario. "Electronic money may encourage easy buying in one scenario, but it could camouflage fraud and crime in another. Money itself disappears in some places, to be replaced by barter...The voices of imaginary women who have lived through them help to give realism and texture. Thus [the four] scenarios are a textual form of virtual reality.... (p. 21) Main Idea--Future Implications: One of the main purposes of a scenario is to illuminate the present, not necessarily to predict the future." (p. 311)

Scenario 1: Backlash. "In this scenario the priorities, mores, and values of religious, tribal, political, or national groups dominate over individual rights in a depressed, no-growth, regionally oriented economy. A black economy, far larger than a local black market, is itself fueled by international narcotics trade.... For women things have seldom been so grim: If they work for pay, they are the last hired and first fired; they get the worst jobs and differential wages. They are expendable." (p. 28) In this futuristic world, Christian and Islamic fundamentalist leaders lay the troubles of a suffering people-crime, poverty, political corruption, disease, failing schools-at the feet of women. "It was women's unnatural ambitions for themselves that had caused them to neglect their duty to their husbands and children and upset the old, peaceful, natural, and God-ordained order." (p. 29) By 2005, women were bound to their guardian husbands and fathers. "Women who had once been fearful only of going out after dark now needed to fear the daylight too. Thus many consented to having homing devices placed under their skin, which certainly permitted them to be found in emergencies, but which also offered them up as victims of spying." (pp. 31-32) By 2015, sex was perceived as a weapon. "Men accused women of using sex to exert power in business, to get extra business, to get promotions, whatever they wanted. Conversely, many women argued for asexuality-avoiding anything but electronic communications with men, refusing to talk or think about sex. [These women] believed that if they denied their sexuality they would be safe." (p. 36) In the 1990s men were determined "to put women back into their traditional place. If beating women is traditional, then beating wo