Check out the video, below, which discusses some of the major paradoxes we face as a world today. Jay Shetty, an inspirational and international motivational speaker, discusses paradoxes such as the amount of mass communication through social media, and yet the fact that people feel more disconnected than ever: The paradox of human’s ability to reach the moon and yet an inability to reach across party lines to understand each other.

The solutions to positively change our world, according to this video, are to alter our perspectives, and to increase our empathy and knowledge by creating different ways of teaching, and delving into new perspectives.  Shetty draws our attention to a famous quote said by Albert Einstein which is that “the problems we have today cannot be solved with the same thinking we used when we created them.”

We face seemingly insurmountable problems. One aspect that has persisted through many centuries, which is hidden in plain sight, is that a predominating group of people have been the ones doing the prioritized thinking and acting. Human populations have been male-dominated, male driven and male controlled. The male thought process has been the major driving force and focus for centuries. Men are incredible and amazing human beings just like women, in similar and in different ways. It just so happens that it is problematic that one group of people, women, have been left out of the equation for much of history. Up until recently , male-ness had been presented as superior, since the Dark Ages of Greece, around 1100 BCE, when the falsity of female inferiority was institutionalized. Although this falsity is sometimes still presented in society, albeit subtly in the U.S, (and sometimes not so subtly,) it still impacts how we think today. But things are changing and it is exciting.

Thankfully, humankind has awakened to the basic fact that females have a unique and powerful intellect and driving force too. And in-fact, they can inspire us to look at things differently and change how we address problems. But although women certainly have contributed a tremendous deal to history, and have helped inspire revolutions and social change, and created inventions and helped transform our world, women still have been forced to take a back seat for much of the time. What if we stopped using the same line of thinking that got humankind into so many problems in the past and changed the way we think by empowering and encouraging the female voice and thought process? Variety is good. What if we changed the way problems are addressed by empowering new perspectives, i.e female perspectives (of all backgrounds)? What if instead of politics, war and international relations being dominated by male thought process, what if females had an equal role in it all? They could offer different perspectives and solutions.

This of course does not mean driving men out, it simply means empowering the female voice and thought process too. And a major part of this means enlightening both women and men to make compassionate, informed change. (It is important to note, this isn’t always starkly divided by gender lines. We all have known men who are way more feminist than some women. It just depends on the person. But what this all refers to, is inspiring informed, compassionate knowledge for everyone, and that includes women too.)  

Instead of a male dominated world, what if we had a male-female balanced world and a male-female balanced way of understanding the world and of driving change? What if we encouraged stereotypical female traits, such as empathy, compassion and love, to be prevalent in international politics and policies? 

That is part of what gets me so excited about women’s empowerment: It will help everybody. By altering the way we’ve addressed world problems by simply adding informed women into the equation, we can address the paradoxes we face. Empowering and lifting up females to that of equality with men is a MAJOR component in addressing these paradoxes our world faces today. By addressing problems in a different line of thinking than that which created them, we can create lasting, and influential change. As Jay Shetty says in this video, we need to create different ways of teaching and expand our minds. Lets utilize the female brain to it’s full capacity too, not just the male brain, and we can transform our world for the better.