Generations: Sage Systems and Digital Grandmothers

I’m a member of a generation of women I like to call BoomHer Generation.

In many ways the Women’s Legacy Project is about a point in time and the women who live in this nexus that connects awareness, challenges, and technology at this tipping point in human history and our planet’s life.

Our generation is a collection of women who lived through the moment when centuries and sensibilities changed, almost imperceptibly, into an urgent awareness of this moment of precipitous discontinuity.

Climate change may well change everything, including social structure.

A generation is usually defined through cycles of population as time it takes for one group of people to replace themselves biologically.  I like to use a rate of around 3 generations per century based on anthropologically informed genetic research.  The generational length for women and men is slightly different, too.  In the short term this means almost nothing.  Women’s generational length is around 29 years and men’s is around 34 years.  But taken over long periods of time, the rate of women’s evolution is more rapid than that of men.

Yep.  Here it is, published research that shows women are more highly evolved than men.

Women who are old enough to be untethered from the daily demands of rearing offspring, and who are ingenious enough, or wealthy enough, to be geographically mobile, or savvy enough follow information highways and paths to trends around the world know that something is brewing in women’s culture.

This make me want to yell out, “Coffee’s ready; let’s talk!”

What I’m hearing different groups and quite distinct types of women say, include:

• gender equality is at the core of sustainable development
• the feminine divine is the path forward
• women’s voices are the keys to freedom

Today’s women who are old enough to remember the last century know that women’s roles have expanded but we all know that equity has not improved and has actually worsened for many during the last decades.

The one area that has improved is global communication.   There is still an information divide, and there are information deserts, but communication is much easier across a much larger distance.

The first generation of digital grandmothers is right here, right now.  Not everything is rosy, but women of a certain age are sage individuals and information archival and retrieval experts, for families, communities, and now for the global community.  This really is changing everything!

Some of the best tools you might discover on your legacy journey may well be what other women know and share.

Global instantaneous communication can defeat traditional (hierarchical and patriarchal) attempts to repress expression by gender, age, status, or other traits.  As I always say, “Information flows toward freedom.”

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This is a second edition article.  Originally published in April 2016.