A response to the question, "where are all the women in futures studies and foresight?"

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APF Compass | July 2016
Women. When are women
not thinking about the
future? From the earliest days,
planning for food, planning for childcare,
planning for the household, anticipating
others’ needs, anticipating their own,
anticipating challenges in achieving goals –
their own, their families’, their
organisations’, their world’s. Jamais Cascio
once argued that humans are innate
forecasters, giving the example of
paleolithic hunters knowing where the
spear would hit the prey. But what about
the innate anticipatory talents of the
gatherer side of the human family?
Anticipation forecasting when trees
would blossom and fruit, and when wild
grasses would ripen, and how many skins
needed tanning to clothe the tribe’s new
members. Humans thrive on thinking
about the future. Flash forward five
millennia, and thinking about the future is
now both a theoretical and applied
discipline, an academic field, a practice, an
art form. With women. Seriously.
Women in futures: a tale of
two conferences
First Eleonora Masini Women in
Futures Symposium
At 7.15 am on June 10, 2015, twenty people
boarded the MS Grace in Stockholm
harbour, sailing for Turku, Finland. Fifteen
women and five men filed into the on-
board conference center to participate in
the first “Eleonora Masini Women in
Futures Symposium,” organised by the
World Futures Studies Federation. The
symposium was coordinated by two
notable women in futures, Natalie Dian
(Sweden) and Leena-Maija Salminen
(Finland). It kicked off with a video
keynote from Professor Masini (Italy)
herself sharing her experiences as a woman
in the emerging field of
futures studies. Over
the rest of the day,
participants presented
their research on
futures for women, as
well as futures by
women, from countries
all over the world,
ranging from Taiwan,
New Zealand, and
Australia to Mexico
and Argentina to
Ghana and Malawi to
Sweden, Finland, and
Germany. Two of the
presenters, Professor Guillermina Baena
Paz and Ms Aletheia Berenice Montero,
are now both recipients of the 2016 WFSF
Presidential Award for Outstanding
Women Futurists.
This seminar was designed to honor
Eleonora Masini as one of the founding
thinkers of the academic field of futures
studies, and to honor as well the work of
generations of female futures researchers
since. At the time of the seminar, all three
major futures professional organisations
were headed by women: Dr. Jennifer
Gidley, president of the World Futures
Studies Federation; Dr. Amy Zalman,
president of the World Future Society; and
Dr. Cindy Frewen-Wuellner, president of
the Association of Professional Futurists.
Since futures’ early days in the 1950s,
women have shaped the field. Among the
eminent scholars who worked to build
futures studies as both an academic
endeavour and an arena for social action
were Prof. Nováky Erzsébet (Hungary),
Prof. Ana-Maria Sandi (Romania), Prof.
Magda McHale (UK and USA), Prof Elise
Boulding (USA), Hazel Henderson (USA),
Prof. Donella Meadows (USA), and
Barbara Marx Hubbard (USA). That list is
illustrative, not comprehensive, but it does
highlight the range of disciplines these
sharp minds brought to thinking about
futures: politics and public policy,
planning, education, political economy,
arts and culture, sociology, economics,
systems science, and philosophy. Women
planted the seeds of futures studies,
rooted it in their previous experience and
scholarship, and supported its growth: the
first Masini Women in Futures Symposium
celebrated that. But it was a quiet
Keen eyes, sharp wits, kind hearts
by Wendy Schultz
Above and top centre: the Eleonora Masini “Women and Futures”
Symposium. Images, Wendy Schultz.

2. W O M E N I N F U T U R E S
APF Compass | July 2016 3
celebration, and the furor that erupted a
little over a month later in certain social
media circles demonstrated just how quiet.
WFS 2015 and the “Where are
the Ladies?” kerfuffle
Last summer’s Avengers
blockbuster included a party scene
with an amusing moment where Maria
Hill—a very tough lady in her own right—
turns to Tony Stark and Thor and asks,
regarding their high-performance
significant others, “Gentlemen, where are
the ladies?” She takes a gentle poke at the
testosterone levels in the Avengers
headquarters and the very visible
preponderance of males on the Avengers
team.
A similar moment arose after the World
Future Society’s 2015 Conference in San
Francisco, when Rose Eveleth of The
Atlantic summed up her impression of the
field in an online article asking, “Why
Aren’t There More Women Futurists?”1
She interviewed both Zalman of the WFS
and Frewen-Wuellner of the APF, who
both acknowledged that the stats indicate
only one-quarter and one-third,
respectively, of their members are women.
She interviewed other female futures
researchers as well, who variously pointed
out that the lack of a hard and fast
definition for ‘futurist,’ makes them
difficult to identify with certainty, male or
female. As for why the futures stage
spotlights so few female futurists,
Madeline Ashby suggested that maybe it’s
the tendency of male futurists to give
people what they want: a strongly stated
positive vision of the future—even if that’s
a highly uncertain outcome.2 Women, with
a long history of marginalised, precarious
existence under threat, tend to view
futures as containing many more shades of
grey—and black. Nuance, sadly, doesn’t sell
as well as drama.
Eveleth’s article kicked up a social media
storm, and the tweets were flying furiously
in the futures, singularity, visionary,
foresight, anticipatory, and planning
communities. Responses varied. Rather
predictably, a man—Jeb Kinnison—
suggested that men are innately “more
vigilant” and hence, presumably, more
future-focussed and anticipatory by
nature, going on to say, “…an effort to
force more women into futurism means
less good futurism and more feelz as
guides to policy and planning. Which
means a less dynamic future for
everyone.”3 One woman—Cathy O’Neil—
said, essentially, well I haven’t either
training or experience in futures besides
keen interest in the future, but I’ll jump
into this pool since it’s clearly crying out
for a woman’s critical perspective to widen
the dialogue beyond the merely
technophilic.4 All three of these writers—
Eveleth, Kinnison, and O’Neil—
committed the same error: lack of rigorous
investigation. They took the techno-
deterministic flashiness of
singularitarianism, the big business focus
of scenario planning consultancies and the
popularist futures pundits as the whole
field. Meanwhile, back at the ranch, a
global community of women and men in
futures continued fifty years’ worth of
critical, creative, rigorous work, outside
the media spotlight.
A few people did dive a
little deeper. Marshall Kirkpatrick
of LittleBird noticed the twitter flurry and
decided to apply logic, and his software
platform’s network analytics, to the
question.5 He blogged the result as “125
Top Women Futurists & the End of
Business as Usual.”6With this network
analysis of futures-thinking women who
tweet, Kirkpatrick was trying both to
identify who was putting out futures-
focussed info, and also how much they
were influencing their peers in the futures
dialogue (his public Twitter list of the 125
is published here.)
Kirkpatrick’s list offers a fairly good first
cut at women internationally who are
futures-focussed. But because it was
extracted entirely from Twitter feeds it
misses the non-social media savvy women
who are significant contributors to futures
thinking worldwide, and of course it
misses most of the founding thinkers in
futures studies from the ‘50s, ‘60s, ‘70s,
and ‘80s. The content analysis underlying
this mapping was limited primarily to
English, so it also misses the global
proliferation of futures thinking in
multiple languages and alphabets. The
Millennium Project of the United Nations
University, for example, is a worldwide
network of futures researchers, many of
whom are women.7
The blog article condensed his analysis,
and he interviewed a number of the
women it identified (I was one of those
found by the analysis.) One clear theme
that emerged was that thinking about the
future cannot and should not be limited to
thinking about technological advances. To
riff on Ashby’s comment about male
futurists and the spotlight, perhaps we can
1. Rose Eveleth, “Why Aren’t There More Women
Futurists?” in The Atlantic online, July 31, 2015.
2. Quoted in Eveleth, ibid.
3. Jeb Kinnison, “Why Aren’t There More Women
Futurists?”, August 2015.
4. Cathy O’Neil, “I am a futurist!” blogging at
mathbabe, August 10, 2015.
5. Little Bird
6. Marshall Kirkpatrick, LittleBird, “125 Top Women
Futurists & the End of Business as Usual.”
7. AC/UNU Millennium Project, planning committee
members listed here.

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APF Compass | July 2016
sum this up by saying, “It can’t all be about
boys and their toys.”
Shortly after Kirkpatrick published his
blog, popular futurist Ross Dawson got
into the action, pointing out that he often
gets asked where the female futurists are.
He took a slightly different perspective,
however, in acknowledging that a sizeable
community of women in futures and
foresight exist—but are not as well known
as they should be.
“I thought it would be useful to compile a list
of the world’s top female futurists, for those
who are looking for diversity in their insights
into the future. It is tricky defining a futurist,
so while we have largely selected those who
describe themselves as working in this space,
we have also included others whose work is
largely that of exploring the future.”
He compiled an initial list of 78 female
futurists worldwide, which further
research expanded to 143. Dawson’s list of
female futurists, is sorted alphabetically by
region and includes short profiles.
Dawson’s effort provides greater
geographic diversity than Kirkpatrick’s
network analysis, but there’s a lot of
overlap in their two sets. Yet even taken
together, these represent only the tip of
the iceberg. Many of the women
mentioned are teachers and trainers in
futures, and have guided multiple
generations of futures graduates into
practice. Professor Masini focussed on
women’s futures in teaching at the
Gregorian University, and many of her
female students are actively engaged in
their home countries—for many of her
students were from developing economies.
Are women less well-known as futures
researchers and thinkers because they are
more likely to be working locally, getting
the futures job done, and less likely to
desire a center stage and to court the
media? Maybe we need an entirely new
research strategy for this question.
The Female Futures
Community – roots, branches,
and shoots
Let’s take a closer look at the LittleBird
output—the initial Twitter network
analysis of women tweeting futures-
focussed ideas.
How do we read this plot? What are the
characteristics that distinguish these five
groups of women? A rough back-of-the-
envelope interpretation suggests the
following:
• Blue is mostly non-USA women
focussed on trends and emerging issues
of change, all of whom are practicing
(applied) futures researchers, if not all
formally academically trained
(@elinafuturist; @VenessaMiemis;
@Competia; @TraceyWait;
@FreijavanDuijne).
• Purple is a group of women who spend
a lot of time working with corporations
on strategic foresight, trend spotting,
and competitive intelligence for
innovation (@ErOrange;
@missmetaverse; @CorneliaDaheim;
@StratNarrative; @ymsalvatico).
• Yellow is a group of women who are
also business or innovation focussed in
their futures-oriented work, but many of
whom are not formally trained in futures
studies (@livingarchitect is an architect;
@mgorbis works at IftF, and probably
has a social science background;
@feraldata is an anthropologist at Intel;
@johnsonwhitney is an investor; and
@RosabethKantor is a sociologist and
change management specialist).
• Green is a group of women who often
focus on community, city, and urban
futures, or development futures
(@Urbanverse; @kristinalford;
@avantgame; @prospective; @Fstyles).
• Maroon is women who all have
graduate degrees in futures studies and
are members (or were) of the
Association of Professional Futurists
(@wendyinfutures; @jenjarratt;
@MareeConway; @heathervescent;
@localrat).
Little Bird’s map of women futurists’ connections
and networks.

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APF Compass | July 2016 5
Kirkpatrick’s list of 125 women might
usefully be subdivided by how those
women are engaging with futures:
• Foundation thinkers (and their
intellectual daughters): women who
are formally trained in futures studies (have
an academic degree in futures studies,
and may or may not be currently
employed at a university);
• Aces in applied futures: women who
are long-standing professional futures
researchers (make their living engaging in
applied futures research but who may
not have a formal degree);
• Futures fabricators: women who are
professionals in other fields and are perceived
to be 'creating the future' and thus get
labelled as futurists (just as male
inventors, engineers, designers, and
entrepreneurs get labelled 'futurists', e.g.
Elon Musk and Steve Jobs, even though
they may never do any futures research).
This echoes Dawson’s comment about
including both women who analyse futures
and women who invent the things that will
create our futures.
Foundation thinkers in
academic FS and their
intellectual daughters
Masini, Nováky, Sandi, McHale, Boulding,
Henderson, Meadows, and Hubbard have
already been cited as founding thinkers in
futures studies (the list is illustrative, not
exhaustive). What is perhaps more
important is the genealogy of their
intellectual legacy, unbroken through
generations of graduate students. Masini
taught Fabienne Goux-Baudiment, who is
passing that legacy on through training
and teaching. Rosa Alegria of Brazil owes
much to her work with Hazel Henderson,
and I hope Rosa, Cindy Frewen-Wuellner,
and Emily Empel have absorbed through
me the lessons I learned from Masini,
Nováky, Sandi, McHale, and Boulding.
These are examples; it would be
instructive to create a map of the
intellectual genealogy of futures and
foresight, tracing the impact of the
profound thinking from teachers through
students and out into the world. What is
critical about the expanding numbers of
women futures and foresight scholars
worldwide is that those researchers
working within universities and research
centers have the greatest freedom to
critique the current state of play and
explore the transformational, to
experiment with new paradigms and
processes to expand possibilities for the
futures. These are the researchers who are
building the literature that provides the
foundations for the discipline of futures
studies.
Aces in applied futures
Many of the women currently working in
applied futures, either as consultants or as
strategic foresight staff within
organizations, acquired their proficiency
in futures through years of on-the-job
experience. Gill Ringland of SAMI
Consulting, Angela Wilkinson of the
OECD (formerly with Shell Oil), and
Cornelia Daheim of Future Impacts
Consulting (and the Millennium Project)
are perfect examples. All are also prolific
authors of books and articles, providing
both conceptual and case study
contributions to futures literature. More
recent arrivals in this space include Anab
Jain, Bridgette Engeler Newbury, Chew
Lin Kay, Yvette Montero Salvatico,
Vanessa Miemis, Marina Gorbis, and Katie
Aquino. The younger generation of
applied futures aces are combining futures
studies and design thinking, hackerspaces,
imagineering, crowdsourcing, and digital
media skills to create the future of futures
studies itself.
Futures fabricators
Finally, we have the women who are
creating the futures directly, via
innovation, social entrepreneurship,
community action, political critique, or
art. Rachel Armstrong is an architect
designing biological surfaces for buildings
—and one day biological buildings
themselves. Genevieve Bell fine tunes user
interface experience for the future of
computing at Intel.
Jane McGonigal creates online
crowdsourced gaming environments that
help people explore and overcome future
crises and challenges. Ilona Gaynor
creates art exploring future
improbabilities and impossibilities both
for public enjoyment and for applied
research. These women are also
contributing to the evolution of futures
studies—but more importantly, they are
creating new opportunity spaces in which
transformation futures can unfold.
Announcing SWIFT! (Society
of Women in Futures, Terra)/
ELFF! (Earth League of Female
Futurists)/OK, so what’s your
acronym?
The impact thing
A recent discussion on the Association of
Professional Futurists listserv asked,
essentially, why doesn’t our field have more
of an impact?8 Why aren’t we getting our
message(s) across? Why aren’t we
transforming the world and future
possibilities? After all, futures studies,
both academic and applied, has existed for
over fifty years. What was interesting
about that conversation—which featured
both male and female futurists—is that
many of the people participating have in
8. See “Shingy versus the futurists”, Compass, April
2016, for an edited version of this discussion.

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APF Compass | July 2016
fact had significant impacts on the world.
The more striking examples include
encouraging creation of a national
museum of the future, and organising an
entirely new field of anticipatory studies.
Everyone in the APF must demonstrate
either formal education in futures, or
active experience of practice in the field:
this means that everyone in the APF is out
in the world engaging people in identifying
and extrapolating and discussing and
designing possible and preferable futures,
whether locally, organisationally, nationally,
or globally. And much the same is true of
members of the World Futures Studies
Federation, and the professional members
of the World Future Society.
Supercalifragi… what’s that
pile of sand doing there?
So what’s the problem? Are we just
envious of those people who do grab the
spotlight? Do we all want, or need, to be
Ray Kurzweil or Elon Musk? Is it go big or
go home? Here’s an idea—maybe we
should put our money, hands, time, and
talent where our chaotic complex mouths
are, and be happy at sticking to the local
knitting of futures by taking the motto,
“Supercriticality!” Supercriticality is the
point at which one last grain of sand
dropped on the sandpile causes its
collapse.
If we focus on adding critical and
creative futures thinking into every
dialogue, every action, every part of our
social and professional networks, if we
knit the futures one chat/tweet/game/
prototype/story at a time, then we are
adding grains of sand to the pile of
potential transformative change. We
engage other people in adding grains of
sand to the pile, until we have involved
enough people that someone will drop
that last grain of sand that transforms the
world. It’s not showy, but it gets the job
done. Some of us will be the Zaha Hadids
of futures studies. But some of us will just
be taking care of the daily household
chores of shifting sand. Both are useful.
Both can be revolutionary and
transformational—just at different scales.
From sandpile to a sandbox
of our own
Women, it’s time we have our own play-
pen. It’s time to see how we can
distinguish ourselves from the guys in
imagining, transforming, designing, and
creating futures. Ladies, let’s get together
and colonise the future. Let’s make it
interesting. And let’s do it better.
“When I think about the kind of future I
want to build, it’s very soft and human, it’s
very erotic, and I feel like so much of what I
identify as futurism is very glossy, chrome
painted science fiction covers, they’re sterile.
Who cares about your jetpack? How does
technology enable us to keep loving each
other?” (Monica Byrne)9
Now all we need is a name. ◀︎
Dr. Wendy Schultz is Director of
Infinite Futures, a futures
consultancy based in Oxford,
England. She is an APF member,
and a Fellow of the World Futures
Studies Federation. A shorter
version of this article was
commissioned by MISC.
9. Quoted in Rose Eveleth, op cit.
Image: Little Bird