Future

The Future is not Female

Eva Tomas Casado

Mar 7, 2024 — 3 min read

Female building and deconstructing a Lego House - Dall-E

The Future is Female. Every time and in every context this sentence irritates me. The Future is Female.

I perfectly understand the symbolic value of this phrase, as a metaphor for female empowerment. However, describing the future as inherently female overlooks the broader concept of futures being a space of possibilities. It limits us in our creativity to shape the yet-to-come by incorporating concepts that may not help us in the challenges ahead.

The Future is not Female

Firstly the Future does not have a gender. Future is a space that we have not yet traveled through. It is a reductionist attempt to limit its possibilities to human-made categorizations.

Secondly, the Future is not. By definition the Future is yet to come, it cannot be anything. Many philosophers contemplated about this circumstances I just climb the shoulders of giants here.

And thirdly: there is no the Future. There is only a space of possibilities ahead of us, we sum up with the word Futures, because we have it written deep in our sense-making of the world to formulate what is yet to come.

The Future therefore is not female.

What is the present?

The present does not have a gender either. It is neither female nor male. But this does not dissolve the fact that we are living in a men's world.

The world, meaning the systems and interrelations in place in the here and now, were designed by men for men. Historically, systems and structures have predominantly favored men. Well, even that is a reductionist view. It reduces the category of men to one stereotype. And if the last decades brought us any learning it should be that there is a whole spectrum between extreme stereotypes that should be taken into consideration. But still, the systems we have in place do not support and foster the predominantly female strength or integrate the female gaze on things, on the contrary, they suppress that.

That is what it is. But is the present? The present is a word to describe this moment of passing time. The world is frozen in one moment. And this moment we call present. But this does not invoke a sense of being. Does it? I will leave that thought here, and point you to the giants of those thoughts if you want to immerse yourself there. For this train of thought here, let's leave it as also the present is not.

So is there a present? In my perception, there isn't. Every single one of us is looking at that frozen moment from a different set of eyes. Everyone sees and feels something different. Everyone has their own present. The present is like the future not a point in time, but a room of views.

Therefore the present is neither female.

The flip side of a single-sided story

Neither the future nor the present are female. Where does that leave us in our efforts to create more equitable worlds?

Like a coin that can be flipped to reveal another side, there's another perspective to consider. And the other side of this story is:

Neither the present nor the futures are inherently male either.

While historical male dominance in societal structures implies the inevitability of a male-centric perspective, deconstructing these thoughts serves us to question those assumptions.

Deconstructing cemented thought schemes has one major benefit. However, it is crucial to understand that deconstructed is not destroyed. Instead, it signifies that the pieces are still available for us to pick up and build something new.

Our task then becomes the creation of systems and interrelations that serve all humans, regardless of gender by deconstructing with the aim to rebuild not to destroy. Our world is not inherently male nor female (nor human for that matter) but it is within our power to construe it in ways that benefit the most.

And it is for us to remember: life, individually or collectively is a continual journey. It is a process. It is never finished. Why this is important at this point?

Let me say it with the opening lines of Ed Sheeran's song "Lego House":