In this episode, Martina Olbertova—a social scientist, brand consultant, cultural strategist, and semiotician who runs the consultancy Meaning Global—shares why gender and identity are central to her personal, academic, and professional life. She recounts her childhood feeling constrained by restrictive femininity norms, describes her doctoral research on gender stereotypes in post‑modern media, and explains how her consultancy helps brands navigate rapidly shifting cultural meanings. Martina then frames the current upheaval in gender narratives as part of a broader "meaning crisis" identified by cognitive scientist John Vervaeke, where cultural foundations are destabilizing (cultural disembedding) and grand narratives are breaking down. She argues that accelerated cultural, cognitive, and energetic evolution outpaces traditional gender boxes, prompting individuals to assert personal agency and create new, individualized gender expressions. Virginie Glaenzer prompts clarification, and Martina emphasizes the tension between fast‑moving cultural change and lingering identity structures, leading to an explosion of diverse gender identities.
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I have to say I'm really happy to have the conversation with so many diverse speakers. It's brilliant. I've been meaning to really have this conversation for many, many years as my interest in gender and identity is actually quite multi-dimensional. So it's personal, it's also academic, and it's also professional. I'll tell you a little bit more about who I am. So I am a social scientist, brand consultant, cultural strategist, also a semiotician. So what I normally talk about is more sort of brand related, but I'm really happy to finally have the chance to unleash my inner social scientist a bit more and talk about things that really matter. So I have my own consultancy called Meaning Global, which essentially reacts to what is happening in our culture today and helps brands and businesses sort of adapt to the quickly changing cultural context and adapt to the changing meanings, cultural meaning, symbolic meanings, in order to become more relevant in the world today and create new value. So that's what I'm interested in business-wise. Personally, my interest in this topic is quite simple. Ever since I was a little girl, I sort of felt that I wasn't really standing up to the social norms of what femininity is supposed to look like. To me, it was always sort of presented as a very restrictive set of rules and gender norms, and I really, as my own sort of identity and energy, is very expansive and kind of not really loud, but sort of big, you know, populating a lot of space, I didn't really feel sort of allowed to be myself authentically. It sort of felt like having a size 2 little clothes on that you sort of have to fit in and it sort of represses who you are as a person. So that to me has been always sort of an ongoing struggle with how to be myself and myself first and then populating sort of a gender identity at the same time. And academically, I also have an interest in gender identity because my doctoral dissertation was on the topic of gender and media in the age of postmodernity, and I was looking at specifically gender stereotypes, so masculinity stereotypes, but also femininity stereotypes in advertising and understanding how the social reality and the media reality that's presented back to us sort of affect each other and where gender stereotyping actually comes from. So that's a short sort of introduction why I am leading this debate, why I'm interested in this topic. And then I will, right, I will reply to Virginie's question. So what is happening in our culture today? It's very sort of related to the business proposition that I have. So what I'm observing right now is that the sort of cultural foundations and the solid pieces that we were able to rely on historically are sort of disintegrated and being destabilized. And as the cultural foundations are being destabilized, the sort of meanings that we would normally ascribe to things, be it identity or gender or other sort of solid pieces in our culture are shifting their meanings. And as they are shifting their meanings, the culture is sort of disembedding. This is actually a term used by cognitive scientist and University of Toronto professor Dr. John Vervaeke, who specifically talks about the cultural disembedding as the primary reason why we are now facing this crisis of meaning and what he calls the meaning crisis. And what I'm also seeing in relation to that is that the sort of grand cultural narrative of our time is broken, basically. And how that reflects into our own gender identities is in a way that we are now feeling the need to increasingly sort of differentiate on an individual level and create new identities that sort of take us out of the box of what gender used to look like and what we used to sort of ascribe to what what femininity is and what masculinity is in order to allow us to become more of who we are as authentic human beings.
So you're saying that the crisis that is happening today is mostly due to where we come from, is that the meaning and the identities that were built in the last, I don't know, 100 years, those are crumbling down for no reason.
Yes, yes, they are crumbling down. So it's not only that they would be crumbling down sort of randomly, it's because there is this counter-tension, because obviously the society and culture is evolving much faster. We are evolving much faster. Our energies are expanding. Our cognition is expanding. Our ideas of what is possible and who we are and how to authentically sort of express ourselves is expanding much faster and on a much bigger scale than basically the residual boxes of identity and gender are able to encapsulate. And that's why we are sort of hitting on this, like we are hitting the limits of the cultural narrative, and that's why people are sort of taking their own personal agency and striving to sort of express themselves in a in a different way. And that's why we see this explosion of different ways to sort of differentiate on an individual level right now.
