She Said: Feminism Persists Part 2

What would the world look like if it’d been designed by women?

This is part two of a two-part series on feminism.

Photo by Jeswin Thomas from Pexels

What would the world look like if it’d been designed by women?

The thought came to me while I was reading What She Said by Elizabeth Renzetti. Published in 2024, the book focuses on women of all races, ages, and identities. It references dozens of other books, mostly written by women, covering topics from family life to politics to sexist and racist AI technology.

Chapter seven discusses women in the workplace. Specifically, how so many women are pushed out of the trades, management, leadership positions, and more. The usual excuse gets drudged up from the dirt, “Oh, she’s just not cut out for the job…this is a man’s job, it’s not meant for a woman.”

It got me thinking about jobs in general, how since the beginning, they were created by men for other men. Then I thought, is a woman not cut out for the job or is she not cut out for how the job is traditionally done? Is she not cut out for the type of workplace environment that men designed and have existed in for generations?

Now, I recognize that the excuse is a false one. Women often resign due to, say, harassment or sexism in the workplace, or their family life changes—not because they can’t do the job. But what if this is another element to it?

The World by Women

Pondering all of this, my autistic brain then jumped to the entire world. After reading Women After All by Melvin Konner, a book that covers the progression of society from hunter-gatherers to modern civilization, I learned how males, even in the animal kingdom, dominate and control society.

But what would the world look like if it was designed and ruled by women? What could we come up with?

My immediate conclusion was there wouldn’t be any war. There would be little sense to expand any borders or gain more land, but then…would we even have borders? I mean think about it; we literally don’t know a world or any facet of society created and controlled by women. How differently would the workforce look? Or law, or politics, or the environment? What ideas would women have been able to come up with and implement if we’d had the control from the start?

For the record, this is not anti-men, and I do not believe the world would be perfect and without conflict if women were the only world leaders, this is merely a thought experiment. But it is an intriguing one.

Systemic Exclusion of Women

A thread came across my feed just the other morning about women’s contributions to science and other STEM fields (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics). The original poster highlights Vera Rubin, who I think especially demonstrates the disadvantage our world has faced by excluding women.

Vera Rubin discovered dark matter, stuff that makes up 85% of the universe's matter, and about 25% of its energy density. All it took was her walking into Palomar Observatory, an observatory that forbade women going in, to discover it, and in turn, create the field of research working to discover dark matter, or, to try to disprove it.

Women have been barred from education to varying degrees for decades, even centuries. The issue still persists today. Rubin made an exceptionally important scientific discovery by disobeying the rules. And let me be clear this was not ancient history, this was the 1970s.

In part one of this two-part series I end with how often women and other minorities are erased from history. Our stories, discoveries, and achievements are purposefully left out, removed from internet archives, from history books, and from school curriculums. Or those same achievements are credited to men. Such was the case for Jocelyn Bell Burnell who failed to receive the Nobel Prize. It instead went to her PhD advisor on the basis that Burnell was merely a student. Or the accomplishments of a man are outshined by the woman who taught him as was the case of Aspasia, who taught Socrates.

There is an argument to be made about the importance of seeking diverse opinions. What would our world look like if women were allowed an education? Think of the advancements in technology, in medicine, in environmental sustainability? Would our world be falling apart as it is if women were allowed a seat at the table? My answer: at the very least, we would not have yet reached the point of no return.

We Will Not Be Erased

I’ll end this with a pop culture reference that has always stayed with me. There is an episode of Avatar: The Last Airbender where the main character Aang, a wanted enemy of the Fire Nation, enrolls in a Fire Nation school. The teacher asks the class how their former Firelord, who started this century-long war, defeated the Air Nation (Aang’s nation). For those who aren’t familiar with the children’s cartoon, Aang was frozen in an iceberg for those 100 years and knows things current citizens do not. Essentially, what happens is Aang corrects the Fire Nation teacher as the Air Nation had no formal army and the former Firelord defeated them by ambush. A fact completely left out of this fictional world’s history books.

This stuck out, not when I first watched the show, but later on when I saw a social media post analyze this scene and how it so closely resembles the real world. Who writes the history books about war? The winners of that war. And if you don’t believe me: in the beginning of February 2025, Rose D.F. shared that NASA had removed her bio from its website.