Virginie Glaenzer talks with Marc Green, who spent a decade researching masculinity, and Jean-François Noubel, a collective intelligence researcher. They argue that fixing gender imbalance requires dismantling stereotypes about what it means to be a man or woman, not just adding women to leadership.
Before we start this conversation, let's begin as we, as we always do, with a tour de table and have each of you tell us your name, what you do, and why you're interested in this topic. So why don't we begin with you, Marc?
My name is Marc Green. I'm an author and a speaker. I do diversity and inclusion work for organizations worldwide, and my interest for the last 10 years as a senior editor at the Goodman Project is to better understand, write about, and speak about masculinity.
Thank you very much. Excited for you to be here. Thank you for being here. Jean-François?
So, Jean-François Noubel, speaking from this beautiful part of France called Provence, with a very beautiful sky, as you can see behind me. I consider myself as an open source earthling. That would really define the most essential things for me is, you know, earthling first and then open source as a choice to not consider myself as owning anything, but more as living space of flow and connection. I do research and development on a new research field called collective intelligence. Which means to understand how living systems work, not just human living systems, but ecosystems and life in general. To understand the emergent process, you know, when, when you have cells together, what does it make? A body. When you have people together, what does it make? Something called a startup or a sports team or a nation or, or nothing. And that research, I do it in kind of two ways. One, more classical way, like, you know, just doing R&D, talking publicly, publishing papers, you know, writing, doing videos on my YouTube channel and all those things. And the other part goes also in the inner side, because the whole human society and the whole culture also exists in me. So the collective exists in me. I exist as a part of the collective, but also the collective exists in me as a hologram. And so I can also do what I call transpersonal growth or transpersonal development. Which means, you know, questioning collective things like language or gender or belief systems or social codes or foods and all these collective things that I perpetuate through my education and through the matrix in which I live. So I also question those things, and that one of the deep aspects of that goes into, yeah, masculinity, femininity, gender, just the yin-yang aspect of ultimate reality.
Well, thank you for being here, and thank you for joining us so we can question the status quo. So let me begin by thanking you for being brave to help me break the status quo of our understanding of genders. I spoke with several men on that topic, and I realize now that it takes courage to go back in and sort things out. Mark, you wrote a book called The Little Me Too Book for Men that is profoundly changing the story of manhood. And Jean-François, you're an inspiration because you're truly living what you preach by being, for example, in the gifting economy and building relationships on a different level. So thank you to both. In the last few years, we've witnessed in countless books and articles a major trend on calling on more feminine influence asking women in particular to take on leadership roles to fix our system. And I have a problem with that. I don't think that's enough. I mean, don't get me wrong, we definitely need more women in leadership roles to arrive at a more balanced world. But what do we expect, that men nicely line up on the side and just wait for their turn to come back? That's ridiculous. Instead, I think we need to break the stereotypes of what it means to be a man and what it means to be a woman. I believe it's time for all of us to realize that masculinity and femininity are not characteristics associated with gender, but to be balanced and better people, we need both. So why don't we begin this discussion by defining what are those characteristics considered as feminine and masculine that we actually have within us?
