Women to rule the world in 2020

The BBC has produced a series of hour-long drama-documentary films, which uses scenarios to analyse the biggest issues to face us in the years ahead. One of the episodes, produced and directed by Ursula Macfarlane, considers the future prospects for women: If... women ruled the world.

In 2020, Macfarlane has women outperforming men academically, socially, technologically and even biologically.

Scenario planning is an act of speculation, rather than prediction, and this series 'war games' the future, "working out what - based on current trends, technological developments and the decisions of today's politicians - our world might be like in five, 10 or 20 years time."

Some thoughts from the experts quoted in the transcript, which the BBC has made available in advance of the broadcast (emphasis mine):

Professor Steve Jones, a geneticist at University College London claims: "It’s clear that the 19th century was the world of men. The 20th century I think began to get its doubts, and I’m fairly confident that in the West, the 21st century will be the century of women.

Dr Susan Greenfield, leading brain researcher at Oxford University: "People like already to talk about the feminisation of the workplace, and I think that they mean more than just taking down the girlie calendars. As well as all the lofty ideas we have about human nature, there’s a more immediate and pragmatic issue, of the nature of work and what it will mean for women if we’re living in a world where technology has so radically changed our lives, and I think the most obvious change is the reduction in emphasis on physical labour. If you now sit at a keyboard you don’t have to be physically strong any more and that will mean a whole change for the rise of women in the workplace."

"I think the biggest difference between now and our traditional working day is that traditional barriers will have broken down. There won’t be the clear-cut beginning and end to the day. One might argue that women could deal better with that because women have always had complex lives, they’ve always, much more than men, had to be able to juggle the challenges of home and community and themselves and their work place and different times of their careers."

Lisa Harker, Chair of the Daycare Trust: "Women have entered the labour market in droves in the last thirty years, but the workplace has changed very little in that time and the growth in childcare... has not nearly caught up with increasing levels of women working in the labour market. There is now one childcare place for every five children under the age of eight, and childcare is very much a lottery."

Dr Susan Greenfield: "I think what we’re going to see in 2020, in the next few decades, is a great dismantling of what it means to be a parent, what it means to have children. What it means to have that life narrative of watching a child grow, because I think we’ll be able to compartmentalise much more the different factors that at the moment we call motherhood, or childhood and so on."

Mike McClure, Consultant Psychiatrist: "I think the increase in the men’s movements and the plea that they’re making and the way in which they’re doing it indicates that there is some underlying resentment that society has forgotten them, that society undervalues them, and I think we’re going to see an increasing demonstration from them..."

"I think that there’s a minority of men who just don’t fit into society in one way or another, possibly they don’t fit into the new feminised labour market, they can’t adapt sufficiently, so they’re really misfits in this modern society... The more men you have who find it hard to fit into this society, the more likely it is that there will be an increase in violence, and in large measure, that violence will be directed against women."