Feminine rising

Activities during women’s month move into a frenzy for us who advocate for women’s empowerment. We ride this tide called the Feminine Energy that continues to rise. But even as we celebrate loudly during March, our lifelong work continues to build momentum.

This energy is not just about women’s empowerment at her deepest core as a woman, a micro-woman business owner, an entrepreneur and businesswoman, a policy creator, or a leader; but more importantly, it is also the energy of the feminine that we strive to balance with each husband-colleague-boss man. It is the energy that pushes women to strive for financial stability for her family. It is the energy that pushes us to teach young girls to unlock their powers, skills, and voice; and our boys to secure their support toward this.

This is why women groups (and enlightened men) rally together to push the needle toward this empowerment. The COVID-19 pandemic’s impact has only made women grit their teeth in keeping the tide of the feminine steadily rising, despite what the World Economic Forum stated last year that the global gender gap has further increased by a generation from 99.5 years to 135.6 years!

The disgust at the state of the world today is due to the imbalance of the Male Energy. The yang, aggressive, ego-driven, competitive-combative energy that has molded a world tragically in disarray. The Feminine Energy rising is allowing women their strong voices and meaningful participation that will support greater security, stability, and healing in our world.

The changes needed are manifold and multileveled. In perceived male-dominated industries, there is the need for gender-lens supportive business systems. In supporting financial viability and market growth for women, can we find new ways of investing in, or purchasing from, women-owned businesses?

Can we strengthen inclusive supply and value chains that consciously allow women to take a step forward, or support and mentor women rising up in the corporate ladder? Let’s add on corporate boards and government posts where women’s decision needs more representations. Where all these suggestions are actually mainstream now, a far cry from where things were a decade back, the fact remains that there is still so much to do on this front.

The Feminine Energy’s new model is collaboration and cooperation, the guiding spirit is sustainability, and its vehicle is technology as a quick reach to the world. The energy is about intuitive understanding, of looking for alternative ways of doing things. The new form needs gender-sensitive ecosystems and enabling environments. It needs both men and women to understand that women’s economic empowerment makes good business sense. More importantly, by economically empowering women, we put value to the betterment of the next generation’s lives through children that are better educated and healthier. Post pandemic, women’s economic empowerment is a critical strategy for survival. It had to take a pandemic, the present war, the global crisis around us today to finally say that the old ways just won’t cut it.

Let the Feminine Energy take the stage.

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Jeannie Javelosa is a multi-awarded advocate for culture, sustainability, and women’s economic empowerment; writer and book author. She is president of GREAT Women, chair of the Business and Professional Women (BPW Makati), a member organization of PhilWEN (Philippine Women’s Economic Network). She is the author of the book “The Feminine Rising,” available from www.echostore.ph.

Women Who Lead is an initiative of PhilWEN