Should Women Create the Future?

Of course they should. But they should stop talking about it and just do it. (Or not.) Here's a piece in which I cheerfully mansplain.

Elle Griffin

doesn’t like sci-fi.

She writes:

Their futures have always felt stark, with too many spaceships, dark dusty planets, and tortured plots spanning centuries and cryopods and generation ships. Whole lives are spent wearing uniform jumpsuits, eating microwave meals, and living between metal walls. They are masculine utopias, written by boys who love spaceships and science and physics.

I’ve never thought anything was wrong with that until I realized that all of the people building our current technologies are boys who love spaceships and science and physics.

The problem then, according to Griffin, is that the way the future is unfolding is that boys like weird dystopian stuff. Computer chips in our heads. Cramped metal hatches in space. Martian colonies.

“So they’re making it that way,” Griffin adds.

She goes on to cite Elon Musk, who, having taken the stage at Tesla’s Cybertruck delivery launch, said: “Finally, the future will look like the future.” 

“He’s right,” Griffin admits,

But that future was designed by boys, and I couldn’t help but wonder: What might the future look like if it was designed by girls? Would women have designed the “car of the future” that way? Would we have made social media like that? Are moon colonies the future we would be going after? Are humanoid robots part of the world we would create?

Well, I don’t know. I’m a boy, you see.

Griffin’s rhetorical question prompted me to stray from an attempt to answer her question and ask another—namely,

What prompts modern women to ask such questions?

I can tell you that, among men, the difference between men of action and men of words is, well, action. Maybe it’s the testosterone. In other words, men of action don’t wonder. Today’s what-ifs are for tomorrow’s to-dos. And men of action don’t ask for permission or forgiveness to be both imaginative and generative.

They just do it.

Fish With Bicycles

Since Gloria Steinham Irina Dunn reminded us how women don’t need men, women could have created all manner of protopian futures. The few who did participate channeled the best of both the Eros Masculine and Eros Feminine.

• Eros Masculine - (earth) - Just do it.

• Thanatos Masculine - (fire) - End it now.

• Eros Feminine - (water) - Let things flow.

• Thanatos Feminine - (air) - Let things go.

Despite the predominance of women in many professional fields, now with a clear advantage in areas like higher education, medicine, and marketing, it’s strange that people are still talking about women as if the birth control pill hadn’t been invented or investors are only men who prefer women kitchen-bound over ROI.

As one who is wont to ponder things in Theory World and Abstractionland, I know that the real Hero’s Journey is always here on Earth. That means I have to train myself to come down out of my head and inhabit my body. I have to roll up my sleeves. I have to get shit done.

Women know how to get shit done, the chorus screeches.

Really? Then there should be no more screeching. Just doing.

Getting.
Shit.
Done.

After surveying a bunch of women-lead tech companies, Griffin writes:

I’m cherry picking, but many of the women technologists that exist do seem focused on healthcare, environmental, peacekeeping, and communal initiatives more so than cars and spaceships. 

Okay.

To be fair, it seems like we’re getting cybertrucks and spaceships and not a lot of peace and community—particularly in my country. Is that because there aren’t enough women willing to do the entrepreneurial work? Is it because the market for peace and community is down? Or has too much of these supposed femme sectors been handed to politicians and bureaucrats?

I’m not being hard on Elle Griffin. Like me, she believes in creativity, entrepreneurship, and innovation as the primary means of creating the future. Besides, she and I are both a couple of substackers trying to earn a crust. And I dare say she runs rings around me when it comes to her audience size. It’s just that her rhetorical questions invite a familiar refrain among female thought leaders.

Caution: Mansplaining Ahead

Consider the following passage from Nancy Giordano of the Femme Futurists. (Disclosure: Nancy’s an old friend with whom I butt heads from time to time.) She writes:

Frustratingly, as we look to who is currently building the future — and as importantly, who is poised to profit from these big ideas — there are some eye-popping stats: the AI Now Institute last year estimated that women currently make up 24.4% of the computer science workforce and receive median salaries that are only 66% of the salaries of their male counterparts. Women account for just over one in 10 engineers, and this percentage is not increasing. And even with all the attention, women are only 7 percent of top executives in the Fortune 100 companies. Worth noting: there are more men named Michael than total women named to HBR’s 2019 list of top CEO’s in the world. Looking ahead, this glaring gender gap is just as bleak; as reported recently just 2.5 percent of all venture-capital-backed startups have an all-female founding team. Only 9 percent of the venture capitalists investing in tech startups are women. And even today, only slightly more than one-fifth of all American VC investment goes to startups where at least one of the founders is a woman. #FFS.

Admittedly, I bristle at passages like this—i. e. rattling off cherry-picked stats while ignoring others, failing to ask the all-important simple question: “Why?” I can’t prove it, but I suspect Giordano wants to see sex parity in STEM. I’ll be waiting for a similar commitment in areas like roofing, logging, or heavy vehicle mechanics—the most dangerous jobs. Stats designed to paint a just-so story can pollute their purveyor’s rationale. Still, I can see all the femme futurists now, nodding with narrow inferences and credulity, even though all claims of #patriarchy and #institutionalsexism need stern interrogation in 2024.

Indeed, after decades of girls-in-STEM initiatives, you’d think matters in tech would be different today. Not to rehash the Google/James Damore debates, but again and again, we have to revisit deeper questions about natural sex-based and endocrinological differences between men and women, as scientists like Deborah Soh have so painstakingly done. Women just might not be as drawn to engineering crap, writing code, and slavish founder roles as they are to the people professions.

As importantly, we also have to revisit questions about nurture, that is, parenting, education, and culture, that have been well-captured by Brookings Institutions’ Richard Reeves, for example, who has his own eye-popping statistics about the crisis of boys and men, about which Giordano seems blissfully unaware (or, at least, understandably indifferent).

The patriarchy has been dismantled, but so has a generation of healthy development in boys.

Still, I have to give Giordano credit. She’s not exactly bitching about the patriarchy here. Indeed, the whole point of the Femme Futurists Society seems to be to encourage women to just do it, that is, to: “step in, stay in, and contribute more boldly to the work.” (Emphasis mine.) Now, that’s a message I want my daughter to hear, even if she doesn’t gravitate to STEM.

Happily, that’s a message that Elle Griffin is probably trying, however subtly, to deliver in her inspirational Elysian fiction. So, let me be clear: I’m not accusing Elle Griffin or Nancy Giordano of bellyaching about the patriarchy, #FFS notwithstanding. I am merely suggesting that unanswered rhetorical questions or cherry-picked data risk leading their respective audiences to the notion that women’s inaction is mostly someone else’s fault.

Utopia Threatened

As a relevant detour, something else Griffin wrote clued me into what might be a tentative answer to her question, at least in the sci-fi context:

As I research the technological future in my own utopian novel, I find I’m much more interested in a pastoral world where the technology is so advanced it’s almost never actually seen.

Where medicine grows on trees and information is transported through water. It’s not that I’m against technology, I very much think technology can make our lives better, but I don’t want a humanoid robot walking around my home, and I think we can come up with something prettier than the Cybertruck. 

I don’t know what sort of book Griffin is writing, but I feel compelled to warn her—not as a man, but as a fellow writer: Novelists have to be entrepreneurs, too. This has little to do with the author’s sex. Entrepreneurial novelists almost always have to write compelling stories, whether the target audience is men, women, or a general audience.

Indeed, I had my (male) employer once suggest to me a story about his own utopian world, which he described in excruciating detail. It was his vision of his perfect world.

The problem is it wasn’t a story.

Likewise, if Ms. Griffin doesn’t, say, write a villain who threatens—or God help us succeeds!—in despoiling her pastoral world, adulterating the tree medicine, or hacking or electrocuting the information “transported through water,” then—like my boss—she will have no story. At the very least, her female protagonist will have, like Bilbo, to leave the bucolic tree-medicine Shire and venture out among the orcs, cybertrucks, or evil-doers! Or if it’s a romance, what does that have to do with the pastoral setting?

It’s not a boy thing to think that successful stories have to have tension, threats, or rising-falling action, right? I could be wrong. And if I am, Elle Griffin should “criticize by creating” with her next book. But here’s the thing about just doing it: Whether you are a boy or a girl, you’ve got to find a whole bunch of boys and girls to pick up what you’re putting down. And that’s hard.

Here’s Griffin again:

Maybe if we had more feminine sci-fi dreaming up our futures, and more women tech founders building it, the future we create would be less focused on shiny metal things that are cool, and more focused on green, growing, communal things we can create. 

Maybe.

Still, that follow-up question niggles. Why don’t we?

Different Realms

Maybe green, growing, communal things don’t belong to the magisterium of the mass-produced where “girl bosses” and “women in tech” run companies with profit-and-loss statements. Maybe these valuable things belong—at least in great measure—to a different realm, one that has to be imagined and cultivated in more sacred places. (And not, for Chrissake, in government.)

My mother, for example—as first-wave-feminist as they come—has spent her retirement growing gardens, tending goats, and harvesting mohair to make art dolls. Her property is beautiful—a personal Utopia that she works on every day. It takes imagination, yes. But it takes a lot of work. And I dare say it is just the sort of spiritual center that cannot roll off an assembly line like a cybertruck.

My mom’s. You wouldn’t believe the backyard view.

Maybe it’s just okay for more men and women like my mom to be more direct and potent in expanding their green, communal sovereignty—not by trying to profit through being techies or girl bosses or even in trying to write more bucolic sci-fi books, but instead by actively creating local Utopias they want to live in by getting shit done.

Can you tell that my mom is my hero? (So is my great-grandmother.)

Griffin continues:

“It’s not that we need less [fewer] boy utopias, but we need a hell of a lot more girl ones,” says Griffin. And therefore, she adds, we need “more women sci-fi writers to dream up the future, and more women technologists to build it.”

I can’t disagree.

But if this is true, don’t ask permission. Don’t ask forgiveness. Just do it.

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Elle Griffin writes at The Elysian.