Why the feminine business principles?
This is the first of three posts sharing about a collective investigation with The Point People into what sisterhood — or regenerative—economics might mean. The second is here, and third here.
This questioning began a number of years ago for me, when I came across the Feminine Business Principles created by an artist & business person in LA, Jennifer Armbrust co-creator of sister.is. For me, the principles are a way to experiment with reaching a new level of business in the world — to start to define what regenerative business might look like.
They are important because we can see it is impossible to regenerate the earth if you operate an extractive business model. If we want a shift to regenerative farming and to regenerate the earth and all beings, then we need to have the way businesses operate also be regenerative.
These principles are so vital to me because they give me hope that business can transform into a force for positive change.
They are literally the backbone of how I operate in the business world, they give me space for all the things that many people said had no place in business. Even just the first principle, ‘you have a body’ — in the business context is oddly profound. How did business get so disconnected from being alive?
In May Cat Drew and I led the first exploratory workshop on Sisterhood Economics for our monthly The Point People meeting. To get people thinking about Sisterhood Economics (which has no definition) we shared a bit about what economics means and is for, and some of the questions we might ask ourselves to imagine this new economic paradigm.
It’s important to acknowledge the economy is a concept humanity constructed to support our civilisation, it is a social science not a natural science. The word economy derives from the greek words for ‘household’ and ‘manage’. It’s literally how we want to manage households.
A given economy ‘is the result of a set of processes that involves its culture, values, education, technological evolution, history, social organisation, political structure and legal systems, as well as its geography, natural resource endowment, and ecology, as main factors. These factors give context, content, and set the conditions and parameters in which an economy functions. In other words, the economic domain is a social domain of human practices and transactions. It does not stand alone.’
The economy is not a set structure we must exist within but something we can help to transform by the way we organise, the way we produce, use and manage our resources.
Sisterhood economics is about recognising this and beginning to construct a vision of an economy that supports many feminine values, as outlined by the contrasting diagrams of the values of the feminine economy and masculine economy from sister.is. Consider that the current economy we have built acts to reward those who are willing to win at all costs; to foster aggressive competition; to reward those who already have assets; to keep us all in a state of feeling we need more; to hide our real selves at work; to aspire to have more than others and grow bigger than others; and ultimately to make as much financial profit as possible. Is that what we want?
Can you imagine a world where your work is a healing for yourself and others? Where telling the truth is rewarded more highly than turning a profit? Where feelings are celebrated and seen as a vital part of a thriving economy? Where you feel you are enough, just as you are? Have you ever experienced that in your life, or seen that in others? Can you recount a story, or give an example of what that looked like? If you are having difficulty just take a moment to realise what that means, how deeply it is engrained in us that we must participate to win, to accumulate assets for ourselves, to be better than all those around us and to always feel we aren’t enough. Is that what life is for?
As part of the workshop we asked ourselves the following key questions and shared examples and thoughts about beginning to answer them (they are rather massive questions, this is the tip of the iceberg).
What are the myths of the current economic paradigm? In her book Donut Economics Kate Raworth shows that the concept of ‘trickle down economics’, or that inequality will even itself out, is a story based on extremely limited data. Despite the limited hypothesis, this concept somehow become economic fact and was taught to all economics students for 50 years. It is of course a very compelling story for politicians and the wealthy as it means they don’t have to worry about inequality as the economy grows, so maybe no wonder it was so quickly adopted. Raworth lays out in her book how this principle has now been shown to be a myth — even Simon Kuznets who originally published the hypothesis re-iterated that it should not be used for making “unwarranted dogmatic generalisations”. And yet, our stories about how the economy works still haven’t changed. Read more here and we definitely recommend reading Donught Economics to uncover many more economic ideas you might be surprised aren’t true.
How can we have an economy that encourages capital sequestration rather than capital evaporation? Molly Madden of Red Hen Collective first introduced us to the idea of capital sequestration and capital evaporation. Capital sequestration is the idea of keeping capital embedded in the community, so a dollar spent in your local bakery will have way more impact on people’s lives than a dollar spent on Amazon that immediately evaporates into an off-shore bank account, and is traded on stock markets, having almost zero impact on the community. Essentially, how can we have an economy that is about nurturing a community, rather than ‘nurturing’ abstract figures that benefit a few people? A good example of focusing on capital sequestration is the Cleveland or Preston model of community wealth building, where spending money on local businesses is built into how the local council (and all its procurement systems) work.
If scaling and growth is not the goal? What are we doing this for? What might business look like without scaling up? If they don’t grow every year? I shared that when I look deep inside myself I realise it’s very difficult to imagine a positive existence where I was to live day to day without any concept of progress or change. I think that is true of most humans I know, we have to believe we are working towards something. However, I certainly can imagine a world where what I was working towards was not growing the company, scaling up and generating more profit. We discussed that there are many ways of scaling up impact without growing a company (more on that in the next question). What if we decided we had enough profit and instead we were working towards more gratitude, more ease, more empathy, being more fully self-expressed, being more connected to nature?
If you aren’t scaling up then you don’t get ‘economies of scale’. Where have you seen examples of infrastructures building resilience in fragmented systems?
It feels like this question speaks directly to a lot of the work The Point People do. Here are a few examples that occurred to us right away:
The work fellow Point Person, Cassie Robinson, is doing with Catalyst to massively accelerate UK civil society’s use of digital is a great example of infrastructure that is building resilience for the many different charities, institutions and entities that make up civil society today by providing digital know-how in a collective way. And the Foundation Design Lab is bringing many ideas and ways of working from the design world to the same sector to further build capacity across the many different smaller entities.
Small Food Bakery in Nottingham set up the Small Food Collective to provide supportive tools for the many local shopkeepers and food producers in their city. The Small Food Collective call to action for their first meeting was “There are many mechanisms (production and retail) that need to be re-examined, there will be many solutions, and perhaps all of them are useful. But underpinning everything, a better approach has to be one where power is devolved into the hands of more people, in stronger local networks. Our city needs more food producers and shopkeepers who are prepared to step outside the status quo and work in the interests of building a new cuisine with ingredients traceable back to good people and healthy soil. That’s why we need to mobilise a Small Food Collective.”
Farming the Future is an example of funders working in this way, they are specifically providing funding to support collaborations between different regenerative food and farming charities, businesses, influencers etc as well as building a general comms fund focused on collectively harvesting and sharing messages of a more regenerative food system far and wide, for the benefit of all involved. The power of these collective projects and messages are usually inaccessible to smaller fragmented groups, so Farming the Future is providing a new level of resilience for the many diverse smaller entities.
If the economy is a tool to support civilisation: What is our economy designed for? What do we want our economic system to support?
This feels like one of the most important questions of our day if we see the economy as the way we will continue to navigate life on earth and really the context for this whole exploration into Sisterhood Economics. In some ways this is the realm of the brilliant economic thinkers who are questioning and proposing viable visions for the future of our economy, such as Kate Raworth and Marianne Mazzucato (read more here). It is also a question we can all ask ourselves on a day-to-day basis through the lens of Sisterhood Economics, starting with the first feminine business principle, how have you recognised your body today in your work? Imagine — a new economics as the recognition that you have a body. Radical right?
In the next two blog posts first we explore some examples of Sisterhood Economics in action and then we re-imagine what the economy would look like if Sisterhood Economics was the norm.
