Change swirls around us as we move into the coming century, the next millennium Official focus falls on political, economic and technological change but fails to take into account one of the biggest changes of the waning twentieth century, the changed status of women We mean not just their legal and economic status--which can he altered with pen strokes--but also their own views of themselves, of their rights and their potential.
If nothing better than linear progress prevails, its glacial--not gliding--pace will subvert hopes for equality for many generations Young women are already voicing discontent with their lives If they can't succeed in business or government often they blame themselves instead of circumstances, a pattern too typical of women After all, they reason, equal opportunity laws are in place (at least for now) in most Western countries; obviously some women are making it; why not them?
A more sophisticated analysis drives them to step back and ask whether success on these terms is worth it. Do they really want to be one of the boys in an unchanged boys' world, or do they want genuine change? In anger and frustration, they drop out, in the belief (not entirely unfounded) that they can at least change their own lives--be a self-employed entrepreneur, be a full-time mom--without taking on the thankless task of reforming an intractable system.
Everything--again, technology, the global economy, and global political structures--is changing, most of it quickly. Everything, that is, except the creep toward sexual equality. Optimistically, women greet each small incremental change, each "first woman to" event as assurance that they're on the right path, they'll eventually get there But incremental changes for women, important as they are to individuals, are not structural changes. Sometimes even negative change is interpreted as merely the last gasp of the resistant old order. Women often see what they want to see and force fact to support hope. Two Steps Forward, Two Steps Back.
The facts do not easily lend themselves to hope. The facts are that women do not get equal pay for equal work, though economic and social trends have forced women to become breadwinners all over the world, for some a novelty, for most the same old situation Those breadwinners still work the "second shift" at home. And now they face a future including their old age, with no guarantees for their security. Nearly everywhere, women as a group are getting poorer relative to men. We sometimes wonder whether the greatest number of have-nots in the age of information will be women--of all colors,.ages, and persuasions. Backlash.
Then again, the portents also suggest that the future could bifurcate wildly: everyone faces the potential for enormous conflict and savage repression, events just as possible as the glacial path to equality. Complex systems can often become chaotic.

But--reimagine a glacier. Glaciers are deceptive. Beneath their immense, silent frozen stillness, their apparent inertia, rivers of ice secretly recarve, even destroy, the soil, the rocks, the mountains. A glacier's very weight and size feeds on itself and accelerates growth--the immense Kutiah Glacier in northern India is said to have advanced at times by 360 feet a day. When the glacier disappears (and on a geological time scale, that can happen swiftly) the land beneath it emerges unrecognizable, utterly transformed. New flora and fauna find homes here; the weather, even the climate, changes. Sea levels rise and Iowlands flood. It's a different planet.
And so in this hook we have also boldly imagined the heretofore unimaginable--a Golden Age of Equality. "Equality" does not mean "the same" in this scenario: indeed, everything is different, nothing is the same, not men and women, not the lives they lead. This scenario is neither far-fetched nor implausible. We offer it here as a possibility for positive change. On the other hand, that new postglacial landscape might push women into lives that are distinctly apart from men's, in the scenario we call Separate--and Doing Fine, Thanks!

No, the issues aren't resolved yet, and they aren't going away. We owe it to ourselves to consider alternative futures, based on what we know and what we can project from that. This exercise will permit us to examine our mental maps, our assumptions, and allows us to revise them and decide the courses of action we want to take.
In this book we've taken a global view, because we believe the destinies of women everywhere are linked. Our scenarios often focus on the United States because, for better or worse, the United States is to the world as California is to the nation: change happens first in California, then in the United States, and other parts of the world tend to follow.
We have wrestled with nomenclature, and we agree with the Economist that the labels commonly used to categorize national economies are out of date. The phrase "developed countries" implies that the high-income nations are at this point the best they can be--which is clearly wrong. It's more accurate to call them the "knowledge economies," especially when their primary source of growth is expected to be the production, storage, processing, and distribution of knowledge, whether as a good or as a service. The knowledge sector already accounts for at least half of all jobs in knowledge economies. Meanwhile, what does a developing country look like? Is it Singapore, with a per capita income higher than that of Britain or France? Or Brazil? The Economist wants to call these the "progressing" countries since they are moving forward in a sustainable way. Finally, what to call those economies that are standing still or devolving, as so many are in, say, central Africa? Shorthand labels such as the "West" and the "North" can he equally misleading. In this book, we use these old labels, understanding how awkwardly they fit, but knowing they are the most widely recognized.
If economic labels are awkward, social labels are worse. We use the term ''fundamentalist'' to mean religious people who adhere to rigid, inflexible interpretations of scripture that may have been codified a thousand years ago, or only yesterday. On the other haled, Western individualism does not mean anarchy. It has long been understood in the West that individual duties to the community are what ensure individual rights.
Finally, we are not ideologues. We simply hold the straightforward Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted in 1948 by the United Nations, as the mark against which women everywhere can measure their achievements.