Translator: Rosa Rey Reviewer: Peter van de Ven
I'd like to start by inviting you all
to imagine that you are looking at the world through the eyes of a child.
A child who is asking questions.
A child who is asking, "Why?"
in that wonderful, spontaneous and lucid way that children have,
and ask why when they are faced with disharmony.
And there is no shortage of issues
that we could ask this "Why?" to in the world today.
But because we are here at TEDxWomen,
and because it's an issue that has accompanied me on my journey,
I'd like us to ask this "Why?" to the issue of gender inequality.
And on my own journey, I shifted over time,
as I was asking these questions and was faced again and again
with situations where I witnessed gender inequality.
My focus shifted.
It shifted from the external,
from the fact of being a man or a woman,
to the internal.
From the masculine and feminine as the innermost aspects of our being,
whether we're a woman or a man.
It shifted from the apparent,
the more manifest aspects of our existence,
the more - the denser,
to the hidden, the subtle.
From the conscious to the subconscious.
And at the end of this journey, I came to the conclusion -
just like Maya, the heroine of my book, "The Heart of the Labyrinth" -
I came to the conclusion
that one of the most important things we can do today
for our individual and collective sakes
is to reclaim the feminine - to reclaim the feminine.
So, let me explain what I mean
by taking you on an accelerated version of this journey.
I started my career in the Andes, working on maternal and child health,
particularly on reproductive health,
and very quickly I realized that reproductive rights
are kind of at the crux of power relationships between men and women.
And when it comes to sex and to who owns a woman's body,
it really makes a difference if you are a woman or a man.
So I had this external perspective,
What happens when you're a woman,
and when there is a context that expects certain things of you?
Well, you're subject to issues of discrimination,
sometimes abuse, you know,
from the more violent forms of abuse to more subtle discrimination.
And after a few years, I came back to Europe, and I thought,
"Okay, I'm leaving all this behind, now I'm in Switzerland.
This is the place where we're very civilized,
we're very developed,
and of course, this issue of gender inequality is not an issue here.
I can just leave all this behind."
(Laughter)
And I turned my attention to the corporate world.
And there, in my life, interestingly,
wherever I go, people come to me and they tell me their story.
I sit down on a train, the person next to me tells me their life story.
And for a writer, this is wonderful because I get a lot of inspiration.
And in this case, what happened is that there were a lot of women coming to me,
telling me stories of sexual harassment at work, stories of unfair pay,
of opportunities being denied or their careers being stopped,
and I thought, "What is going on here?"
I was very surprised.
And I still have this "Why?" whispering in my ear.
Why? Why is it that even here,
we see the manifestation that is very similar
to what I saw in the development context -
maybe much more subtle, but still - very similar in its functioning.
And I kept asking, "Why?"
And then, about seven years ago,
I was at Harvard, and I had a very eye-opening experience.
I took a test called the Harvard Implicit Test,
which some of you might be familiar with.
It's a test that looks at your subconscious biases,
and you can take it on many different topics,
and of course, I took it on the topic of gender.
So here I was, very aware of the situation of women in the world, their struggles,
considering myself a defender of women's rights,
and I took this test, and lo and behold,
I had a gender bias.
So, I was favoring, subconsciously,
an association between women and family,
and between men and work.
Or: women should stay at home and take care of their families,
and men should go to work and earn the money - to put it simply.
It was a mild bias, but it was a bias nonetheless.
And I was stunned. I thought, "How can it be?"
I just co-founded an organization called "The Gender Equality Project."
(Laughter)
No?
And here I am, walking around with a gender bias.
And this really prompted me to go deeper and deeper.
And you might say, okay, we all have biases, right?
We are all conditioned by the families we were born into,
by the societies we grew up in, by our education,
so we absorb the beliefs from our surroundings.
And in my case, I was born in Switzerland
only four years after women were given the right to vote in federal elections.
So this has enormous implications for the society into which I was born
and where I grew up.
And like, perhaps many of you who grew up here in the 70s,
you will probably understand
that, yes, this really permeated our way of looking at things,
even if we wanted to look at them differently.
So, we could say, okay, we all have biases,
we all are conditioned, you know, big deal.
Well, I would argue that this is fundamentally important,
for three reasons.
First:
Although the bias and the way the test is structured -
the bias was in terms of an association between women and the home
and men and the family -
we live in a world that values things with money,
we live in a world where the profession
is very closely related to our identity and to our worth.
And therefore, it's not a far stretch to say
that such a bias means that I had an underlying belief -
maybe subtle, but nevertheless there -
that women are worth less than men.
And I´m taking myself as an example, but I am by no means an exception.
And so, we have these beliefs, these beliefs are formed,
they are reinforced by situations that we see as we grow up,
and it just reinforces the initial belief again and again.
We come into adulthood, we have these beliefs,
and we are busy trying to do something, defending women's rights,
creating a certification system for gender equality,
but this belief is still there and is working in the background.
It influences our emotional patterns;
it influences our behaviors, our choices, our actions.
So that's the first reason why this is very important.
Second:
As I kept looking at this, I started thinking,
"Well, is it really about women and men,
or is there something else happening here?"
And I suddenly understood that it's actually about the internal,
and that what's really going on here is that it's not a belief that says
women are worth less than men,
but it says the feminine is worth less than the masculine.
The feminine, to me -
and this is my understanding of this wonderful and amazing topic -
but to me the feminine is our intuition, it's the voice that speaks in the dark.
The feminine is untamed, it's wild, it's powerful,
it's ever-changing, it's fluid.
The feminine is what allows us to bring life into existence,
be it physical life, or be it creative life.
The feminine is that which nurtures.
It is also what allows us to experience life in this body,
to be connected to the fact that we are made of flesh and bones,
and that, through this body,
we can experience our connection with all of life.
We are all connected, not through our devices,
we are connected through a felt experience that is very tangible,
that pulsates through the subtle web of the feminine.
And yet we live in a world that has given emphasis to the masculine.
When we go to work, we are expected to behave in certain ways.
We leave our emotions at the door, you know,
we cut ourselves off at the head.
We operate with our rational minds,
make decisions,
we're expected to compete, to strive for success.
It is a world that is imbalanced, in my opinion.
And yet it is not about favoring one and dismissing the other.
It´s about understanding that we have two arms and two legs, not just one,
and we can use them both equally to come into harmony.
And the third reason
why these subconscious beliefs are so important, and particularly this one,
is because if you take it from the individual level to the collective level,
if enough people walk around with this subconscious belief
that the feminine is worth less,
if this is ingrained into the very structures that we have built,
then, it is not just at the individual level that we're out of balance,
but at the collective.
And I would argue that the environmental crisis that we're witnessing today
has its root in the fact that we undervalue the feminine,
we undervalue life,
we undervalue that which gives and nurtures life: the Earth.
If we were truly embodied and connected,
we would feel her every time we take a breath.
Every time we drink a glass of water, we would feel this connection.
It would change our choices,
it would change our behaviors and our actions.
And it wouldn't be out of guilt or out of some kind of a moral obligation,
it would flow, it would be a natural longing to restore harmony.
And I believe that we can restore this harmony,
but it is not about fixing things out there.
Like with the body:
the body suddenly doesn't work, we have to fix it,
we have to perform, we have to bring it back into order.
It is more about coming into harmony within ourselves and with the planet.
And to do that, coming back to the beginning,
I believe we must reclaim the feminine, for ourselves as individuals,
but also collectively, as a society.
And that this revaluing of the feminine should be embedded in our structures
in a very different way than it is today.
To do that, we must look into our minds, we must become observers of ourselves
and ask ourselves,
"To what extent has this belief that the feminine is worth less
sifted into my mind, into my life?"
To spot it, and to root it out completely.
To bring ourselves back into wholeness,
and in doing so, to heal ourselves, our communities, and our societies.
And so, if there´s only one thing you remember from this talk today,
I invite you, as you step out of this room, to ask yourself,
Who am I?
What am I?
What is my relationship with the feminine? Within and without.
May you revisit all answers and, perhaps, find new ones.
And may we together reinstate the feminine in its rightful place.
Thank you.
Applause.