For various reasons, lately I often need to think of the fascinating trilogy written by Dutch writer Thea Beckman, starting with a book titled Children of Mother Earth. It is a futuristic novel, set some time after World War III, which describes the struggle between a utopian country named Thule (Greenland after a global climate change) ruled by women and Baden (a militaristic European nation). The book is a beautiful example of the engaging effect of an alternative future turned into an experience.
The reasons I had to think of it now, are the many projects that keep popping up – and not only in so called developing countries – to educate and empower women to climb the ladder and take up a wider range of roles in society, to be entrepreneurial, to be dreambuilders, to be leaders of change etc. They build upon the powerful notion that large scale, bottom up societal change follows a female line. Future societies as such might hence look a whole lot different.

Roberta Cocco is Director of Marketing for Microsoft Italy. At the same time she is also the driving force behind a non-profit project (suppported by Microsoft, HP and Accenture) called Futuro@lfemminile (female future). Its aim: to teach women about technology and empower them via technology. Palfemminile is specifically aimed at women in public administration.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 4th, 2006 at 09:33 and is filed under projects, technology, trends. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.