Women must lead – if humanity is to survive

I first wrote this article in 2016. It is truer today, even than it was then.

Women must become leaders in government, business, religion and social institutions around the world – if humanity is to have a chance of surviving the growing threats it faces.

Female leadership is one of the essential solutions to the existential crisis which now overshadows civilisation, as I originally wrote in ‘Surviving the 21st Century’ (2017) and ‘How to Fix a Broken Planet’ (2023).

As a rule, women don’t start nuclear wars, dig coal, destroy landscapes and forests, pollute air and oceans or poison their children. They tend to think more about the longer term than do men, and about the future needs of their children and grandchildren. They tend to seek peaceful and constructive solutions to problems rather than fighting over differences in values and beliefs, or resources.

Pragmatic male thought has largely driven humanity’s remarkable ascent, our great technological successes. But in a hot, overcrowded, resource-depleted world it is also our potential downfall, due to the vast risks that modern civilisation is now accruing.

Those risks include: global ecological collapse, weapons of mass destruction, climate change, universal chemical poisoning, resource scarcity, food insecurity, overpopulation, pandemic disease, deadly new technologies and misinformation. These are the product of male groupthink. Men like quick, easy solutions - weapons, poisons, machines, conflict - without regard to their negative consequences.

In both books I lay out the scientific evidence for each of the ten catastrophic risks, and explain how they are now combining to menace the human future. I also describe the wisest solutions, which need to be taken by governments, corporations and by individuals worldwide if we are to successfully overcome these risks.

Many people consider the biggest threat to be human overpopulation. The good news is that women everywhere are already taking action to solve this problem. They have brought the birth rate down from 5 children per woman in the 1960s to 2.4 children today – and it is still falling, in every continent and almost every country.

Importantly, women are taking the decision to lower human fertility often without consulting males. It is a responsibility the female of the species has undertaken because she instinctively understands the dangers inherent in uncontrolled population growth.

When I argue that women should lead humanity in this century, it isn’t an issue of gender or politics. It’s one of the new rules of human survival. Left to male leadership the world will have autocracy, war, climatic collapse, environmental ruin and universal poisoning.

It’s now a matter of choosing the kind of leadership which can best get us through the most dangerous emergency in all of human history.

Female thinking can save the planet, and humanity. And this means female thinking by men as well as by women.

But we also need a majority of wise women in positions of power if we are escape the fate which male aggression, overconsumption and overpollution are creating for us.