WHO RUN THE WORLD ? JUST ASK BEYONCE!!

March 17, 2018 | Sandra Pierce


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Here's what the critics said when Beyoncé dropped the video of “Who Run the World?" ---

" We got to hand it to Beyoncé, she's asking the right question: Who will run the world? She's got the right answer too.... Girls!

Canada's foremost financial services research and consulting firm agrees! According to Investor Economics, women create, control and influence an enormous amount of wealth. In fact, by 2026, it's estimated that women in Canada will control close to half of all accumulated financial wealth -- that adds up to a whopping $1 trillion dollars. Women are,in short, becoming economic powerhouses. We aren't merely controlling the purse, we are filling it!

Notwithstanding such considerable progress in narrowing the wealth gap women aren't quite yet running the world. We continue to be underrepresented in the seats of power -whether in government, academia or the C suite. You don't have to be a feminist to know the stats. But why?

In her latest work,“Women & Power – A Manifesto”, author Mary Beard attempts to explain the pitfalls of gender. It’s not surprising that she would trace this misogyny to its ancient roots as Ms. Beard is an English scholar, classicist and Professor of Classics at the University of Cambridge.

The underrepresentation of women in power, Beard argues, is largely a result of our gender’s fraught history with the act of public speaking. When it comes to silencing women, Western Culture has had thousands of years of practice.

She writes of a “moment immortalized at the start of Homer’s Odyssey, almost 3,000 years ago- a story not just about Homer’s adventures while for decades his wife Penelope loyally waited for him…it’s just as much the story of their son Telemachus”.

When Penelope comes from her private quarters into the great hall to find a bard singing about the difficulties Greek heroes were having in reaching home. She isn’t amused and in front of everyone asks him to choose another happier number. At which Telemachus says:

”Mother, go back to your quarters, and take up your own work, the loom and the distaff…speech will be the business of men, all men and of me most of all; for mine is the power in this household.” And she goes back upstairs.

Beard notes that this is “the first recorded example of a man telling a women to ‘shut up’; telling her that her voice was not to be heard in public”.

A more recent example was the silencing of US Senator Elizabeth Warren in 2017 as she attempted to read a letter from Coretta Scott King on the Senate floor in protest of the appointment of Jeff Sessions as Attorney General. She was told to sit down and when she refused Republican senators voted to formally silence her.

Yet I’m encouraged. According to The Economist magazine, women’s economic development is the biggest social change of our time. And it is remarkable because of the extent of the change: millions of people who were once dependent on men have taken control of their own economic fates.

With all that money women control today and will control, we are finally finding our voice and awakening to the power wealth can endow.

♫♫♫♫WHO RUN THE WORLD♫♫♫♫

♫♫♫ GIRLS♫♫♫