Wellbeing: Women are key to a better world

Lynne Franks

23 September 2013

Guest blog: Women's empowerment guru Lynne Franks argues that improving women's status is the key to sustainability.

My belief is that we can only create a sustainable future for the world and humanity when women and men have equal power in all areas of society. Even in countries in the so-called developed world, we are far from any kind of gender balance in most areas of leadership and power.

In the business world alone, out of 1,110 directors on FTSE 100 boards there are only 192 women. And in the UK there are 147 women MPs compared to 503 men. There is only one woman national newspaper editor. Even in the world of positive change, there are always far more men than women leading NGOs or high-profile thought-leader speakers and authors.

I would not dream of blaming the patriarchal world of the past 2,000-plus years entirely for this situation - we women need to step up and take the mantle for Earth stewardship alongside men. 

His Holiness, the Dalai Lama, recently said that it will be women of the West who will lead the world to peace, which I believe is true. But we have to build up our confidence and take leadership in collaboration and community to ensure that there is a feminine balance when we build the blueprint of a sustainable, co-operative future.

However, the tragedy is the terrible situation of rape, lack of education and general disregard for the rights of women and girls in so many of the world's poorer countries.

Rape as a weapon of war and control is rampant across Africa - particularly in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) where communities are destroyed and marauding mercenaries take over the primitive local mines producing Coltan for our mobile phones.

My friend the author, activist and writer of The Vagina Monologues Eve Ensler has created her dream of the City of Joy.This is a healing centre and farm run by women survivors of atrocities, right in the heart of the most dangerous part of the DRC. Here women are growing their own crops. Through their connection with the land, which they are restoring into a sustainable paradise, they are healing their own deep wounds.

We women have to stand up together and cry 'Enough!'. It is only by working together, alongside men with the same values, that we can use our influence as consumers, as mothers, as grandmothers and as carers to ensure that through our own empowerment we can create a future for the seven generations to come.

Lynne Franks will speak at Resurgence & Ecologist's Festival of Wellbeing in London on 12 October 2013. To book a ticket, please phone 01237 441293 or visit www.resurgence.org/wellbeing.