Many of you will have noticed the proliferation of pronouns in recent times, which has led this Philosopher-in-Residence to consider more deeply her relationship with gender. I’ve spent much of my life describing myself as a woman, but is this just a habit, or something that is unique and important to me? Thus far, I’ve concluded that I do want to continue describing myself as female, but I also would love to live in a world “beyond gender”, where richness of experiences were the forefront of personal and professional life and we didn’t need to be defined by gender.

I haven’t yet transformed the world in this way, but here in the United Plandom this has manifested as me starting to proactively tick “prefer not to say” where I’m asked, and that was one of the aspects that led to this blog title. “Call me maybe” was the title of a catchy Carly Rae Jepsen song a few years back. Is it too much of an expansive posit to say that we could maybe move past defining gender at some point in the future? I’d love to hear your thoughts on this too.

On the subject of maybe, and potential future milestones, with Gender Pay Gap Day coming up on the 20^th November, maybe one day people will be paid equally, irrespective of their gender? There has been “progress”, since the pay gap day fell on November 18^th last year, but only having 41 days being unpaid compared to equivalent male professionals doesn’t feel like that much of a quantifiable win to me (and that’s before the data was interrogated further to understand any coincidental reason for the 2 day improvement such as fewer working age men extant).

With the cost of living at the forefront of the political landscape at present, I hope that gender pay inequality becomes an important part of the navigation out of the economic crisis, not pigeonholed “maybe that’s not critical right now”.

And finally: if you care about this kind of thing, head over to our gender balance campaign page, inform yourself and maybe join the mission.

https://www.makemeaplan.com/the-united-plandom/make-me-a-planel/

Next fortnight, I’ll be musing On The First Day of Christmas – since it’ll be landing on the 1^st December, I couldn’t resist!

Please get in touch with any particular aspects of this subject you’d like me to write about.

In the meantime,

Happy Planning

PS If you want some other free tips for your business life, check out the Working Well blog – out fortnightly on Wednesdays, courtesy of Make Me A Plan’s Productivity Expert, Penny Le Kelly. Browse the latest edition here:

https://www.makemeaplan.com/news/whatre-you-doing-for-christmas/