Someone's watching

Originally written October 2018

I think we might have missed the point.

On 25th September NZ Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern brought her three month year old daughter Neve Te Aroha, along with her partner Clarke Gayford to watch her speech at the United Nations General Assembly, the first time this has ever happened. This was an important milestone, showing in a really practical way how we must rethink many traditions and norms if we're to make the world of work truly accessible for working Mums. It also showed us how men will have to let go of stereotypical Hunter-Gatherer roles to help build a more inclusive world. But something equally important for our shared future took place that day. A child sat and watched the deliberations, negotiations and machinations that will determine what kind of world she will inherit. We live in a time where many things we are deciding today will determine what our world will be like in the future. This is self-evident and has always been the case, but never have those consequences been as potentially dire, the threat so obvious and imminent, the rate of change so exponential.

I wonder how our politicians and business leaders, our policy and decision-makers might think, feel, behave if they were constantly watched by their children? How might they respond if the reasons and rationalisations for their decisions were observed, listened to by the infants that will inherit the consequences of those decisions. Imagine if at our global summits, in our Parliaments and Board Rooms, children bounced on laps or crawled around beneath the tables where decisions that shape the world we will bequeath them are made. How might it impact the decisions we make today if our leader's children, or for the silver-backs, our tribal elders, their grandchildren surrounded them as they made them?

I am proud to be part of a Global Initiative, Homeward Bound that aims to increase the opportunity, ability and access of women with a STEMM background into leadership roles. Over the next few years, as existential challenges like climate change, exponential population growth, food and water security and the many other potential consequences of the decisions we take today become too obvious to ignore, we will turn to our scientific leaders and other experts for answers, ask them to fix it.

At Homeward Bound we believe that it is critical that the answers to these questions reflect the voice of women and men in equal measure, because today they do not. Jacinda Ardern showed us what it will take for society to embrace women as leaders, rather than expecting women to adapt to the norms, structures, attitudes and traditions that have governed our world, developed over millennia by men, for men.

Perhaps it's too much to ask, children in the workplace, in the halls of power, perhaps its impractical, maybe it'll never work.

Perhaps it won't.

But I wonder if we fully appreciate the cost to our world, the consequences for our planet of excluding from the top levels of policy and decision making, the 50% of the population that know what it is to nurture life inside them, to bring a baby into the world.

Perhaps we could start with that.