This makes me angry. I’m sure you’ve seen the stats before… only 8% of Fortune 500 companies are led by women, and less than 1% by women of colour. It angers me, not because there aren’t more women in leadership (I'll save that one for another time), but because we are still looking at the problem in the same way.
Since 1910 we have been observing International Women’s day, which arose in protest to child labor, sweatshop working conditions, and women's suffrage.
What’s really changed? We’ve just switched sweatshops for laptops and been brainwashed into thinking it’s ok for our children to be placed in breakfast clubs, after school care instead of sending them off to factories, so that we can earn enough to feed our families.
Our hierarchical systems, remain the underlying problem behind gender inequality and every other form of inequality.
Whilst we continue to have societal and cultural positioning of one role in a system carrying more importance than another, or one form of gender or identity being superior over another, we will continue to operate dysfunctionally.
The poor will keep getting poorer, while the rich get richer.
Cost of living crisis?! There is only a crisis because we aren’t fairly distributing global resources.
In nature, every single organism has an equally important part to play in the whole. If for example all of our insects vanished overnight, then every ecosystem throughout the world would collapse.
We are nature. We know this, yet we continue to operate as if we are separate from it.
Our systems are currently collapsing. The dysfunction can no longer be hidden.
There is a desperate need for us to shift our focus from profits and productivity to sustainability and human flourishing, from burnout to brilliance.
Take back your power in your own way today. Speak up if you are being shrunk. Say no where you feel someone else is taking advantage or manipulating a situation. Say stop if something being done to you or around you is unjust.
You can be assertive and compassionate at the same time.
I love Marcela Widrig’s phrase for this, FIERCE EMBODIMENT
Bring all of your love, all of your care, all of your belief that things can be different to meet what is out of balance right in front of you.
If we all clear up the immediate spaces around us, the bigger, global picture might finally change…. Or do you still want to be here in another 123 years time? Being told what to do, being taken advantage of, acting as if you have no power to make a positive difference, to play your part in creating change?