by In a couple of recent public sessions, the issue of men, women, values and the future came up. It may be first helpful to distinguish masculine and feminine values from men and women as a gender. In other words, feminine values may be held by either men or women, and vice versa. For shorthand, let’s use Geert Hofstede’s Cultural Dimensions work in which he notes masculine values center around competitiveness, assertiveness, ambition, and the accumulation while the feminine emphasizes relationships and quality of life.
At the Lumina Foundation Reaching the Student to Reach the Big Goal event, New York Times columnist and keynoter David Leonhardt talked about two important groups of the future and how one is doing better than the other in terms of educational achievement. After noting a series of stats about how the more successful group has been increasing their participation in higher ed, while the other has stagnated for a couple of decades, he revealed that the groups were men and women — and that women were doing the exceeding.
The same point came up on Coast to Coast Futures show over the weekend. As we discussed the emerging jobs of the future, the point was made that feminine values in general are better adapted to the network-based economy and business models of the future, while masculine values are more suited to the command-and-control hierarchy models of the past. In her module on the show, Terry Grim talked about her work around “Women as Builders of the Future,” a new course in our Futures Studies Curriculum that, as the title suggests, explores women’s role in building the future.
In talks over the years where this topic has come up, my summation has been “Gentlemen, get in touch with your feminine side.” Andy Hines
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