International Women's Day
It’s International Women’s Day and wherever I look on social media, I see either congratulations or references to injustices that still exist. Much rarer are the actual initiatives being taken to change things from the ground up or bring about systemic changes in depth.
Personally, I always feel a bit strange when I receive a congratulations on Women’s Day. Well, I also feel strange when I receive birthday wishes. Neither is my own doing, and I didn’t choose it either.
In my childhood, I sometimes struggled with being a girl. And I only really started to enjoy it when I became a mother. In the meantime, I enjoy being a woman. So why do I think about it today?
Partly because there is indeed still inequality in terms of rights, participation and decision-making, but also because I am super privileged as a white, western woman to be allowed to sit here and reflect on it.
But I also think about how much of this debate is just a fix-it band-aid, designed to avoid asking the deeper questions in the first place.
Systemic inequality
Our entire social and professional arrangements are built on this (and other) inequity, they are an inherent part of the system and promote and cement both this inequity and inequality. Women who nevertheless make it are often on a very rocky road that takes a lot out of them in terms of strength, authenticity and patience. It is often precisely these women who fight hard to drive forward transformations of a systemic nature because they have seen in their own experience and reflection how many barriers are often no longer placed directly in the way by men, but are simply systemic – systems designed by men for men.
Ahh, before any male readers here turn away, let me say that when I use the term “men” here, I am referring to an old but still very common model of men with a pronounced (often unquestioned) understanding of roles and, above all, unreflected privileges. A model that more and more men are also renouncing and, as a result, are also promoting the bitterly needed system transformation from their side.
However, the systems we are talking about here are the systems that have become incredibly firmly established. Logically, I think first of the education system, which already lays a foundation for gender inequality and promotes early, persistent narratives. But of course the same applies to many elements of the capitalist economic system, the organization and structure of society, politics, work, social welfare and all the way to family systems.
Systems in transition – a last gasp of the ancients
The current rise of the global conservative and ultra-right seems to completely contradict this and yet it also appears to be evidence of the ongoing transformation – a last march of the old privileged who know that they do not have the flexibility to embrace systemic change and so are desperately summoning all their last strength for one last stand in the death throes of a worn-out mindset within inevitable (and already endlessly overdue) transformation.
In our consulting work in companies and learning organizations, we notice this feeling of being torn even more strongly. Conservative forces (especially those that present themselves to the outside world as open, modern and willing to transform) often push with all their might to stick with the old ways. Sentences such as “we’ve always done it this way”, “there is no scientific evidence of the effectiveness of these innovations” and “we don’t have time for such gimmicks” in their various variations are then regularly heard.
In coaching, individuals often reveal deep-rooted narratives, including the definition of masculinity and femininity, which stand in the way of a change of heart in the sense of a systemic transformation. Of course, these narratives are not only carried by men, but by all of us. This is precisely the transformational task that needs to be accomplished here: these narratives must be examined by each individual for their validity and cannot simply be set aside.
The gate of transformation is opening to the inside – for women and men and a society that must manage to find solutions within its community to the major issues of climate crisis, water and hunger crisis, social division, healthcare systems, technological progress and ongoing conflicts, including armed conflicts.
Congratulating each other on International Women’s Day doesn’t help much, just as a diversity officer doesn’t end structural racism or declarations of support for fleeing people doesn’t improve their living and survival conditions.
I think that only action will change things, we’ve been talking about it for long enough.