Why we need imagination as a tool to create new futures & challenge the status quo.
Words by Jaya Bonelli
How do you break free from a vicious cycle? In today’s world, it can be very easy to subscribe to a determinist point of view — this idea that everything that will happen is completely determined by factors outside our individual control. In a society that has come to rely so much on mathematics, physics and pointedly precise calculations, it’s not much of a stretch to assume that our own lives, too, are governed by an infinite number of mathematical relations. For example, take the decision to choose a specific profession or field of work: was it truly an act of free will, or is it instead a perfectly orchestrated summation of causes and factors from your entire life experience, from your childhood upbringing to last week’s lunch? This is, perhaps, a dangerously addictive thought spiral — and one that has puzzled philosophers for millenia, and continues to do so. But to take this question on a more practical level, how does this play out at the level of personal decisions? How can you make sure that your decision is uniquely and properly yours, not merely a fruit of the combined efforts of your socio-cultural background and base biology, to name a few contenders?
This is particularly crucial in the context of the example mentioned above, the choice of a profession when entering the workforce. Despite the recent rise in DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) organizational frameworks to promote diversity in the workforce, there are still quite a few gender inequalities, for instance, that enable the creation of vicious cycles. We’ve all heard of “unconscious biases” in hiring — for instance, with “affinity bias”, the fact that people are often inclined to hire people similar to them. At the hour of choosing a field to specialize in, so many factors can come into play. For example, take the STEM fields, often seen as often seen as more male-dominated, where women represent only 29.2 % of the workforce, whereas they account for 49 % in non-STEM fields. This points to an underlying issue beneath: the gender disparity in STEM shows that there are common factors that tend to turn women away from STEM disciplines — namely, for example, the lack of representation. If, for instance, a young woman from an underrepresented minority has never seen another woman in a leadership position in her field of interest, she might struggle to envision herself in that role. This creates a self-reinforcing pattern: the lack of representation leads to fewer women entering these fields, which in turn perpetuates the lack of representation for future generations. When there are no visible role models to challenge existing patterns, it becomes increasingly difficult to imagine alternatives to the status quo. This vicious cycle becomes deterministic in nature — showing that so many of the decisions we take and that heavily impact the course of our life are not always fully willed by our own conscious thoughts, but also strongly influenced by factors that we don’t always control: our upbringing, our gender, our exposure to role models, our educational opportunities.
This challenge of figuring out ways to “break the vicious cycles” was at the heart of our collaboration in HeyPeople! a project funded by the European Union, whose main objective is to fight against gender stereotypes in online spaces which negatively influence the professional prospects of young people. In our work within the HeyPeople project, we faced the tricky question of trying to find a just midpoint between (1) helping young adults be aware of existing issues related to gender stereotypes in the workplace and (2) completely “discarding” these problems in the status quo in order to inspire young people to overcome them. Given the wholly mimetic nature of human beings, how can you show what’s wrong and, at the same time, help them internalize alternative possibilities, when the “what’s wrong” is the reality? It’s another deeply complex question, and you can’t answer it in a paragraph or even a thesis, but our way to address it, in our work within HeyPeople!, was through the beautiful, transformative power of imagination.
While doing research on the topic, we saw that almost 85 % of future jobs worked by today’s college students haven’t been invented yet. This means that there’s this vast land of possibility waiting for exploration — there’s a growing 85 % percentage of tomorrow’s labor that can have fair work opportunities. Of course, we’re not that idealistic — and as time goes on, it’s not as if that 85 % of new jobs will be created out of thin air to distribute to a perfectly fair chosen group of people. Who would even choose the exact people to dole out the news jobs to? It would never be an irreproachably just and fair decision. And yet, now, as we think and reflect about the future, we can “have fun”, and take this blank canvas of the future workforce to emit visions and aspirations about what’s to come.
This is exactly what we did in a workshop we held back in March 2023, as part of HeyPeople’s launch event in Spain. One of our big focuses was on unveiling AI bias, and its impact within gender stereotypes in the workforce. AI algorithms, fed by vast amounts of data (overwhelmingly from US sources), process information by categorizing and sorting.
During our workshop, we saw this clearly when AI image generators showed CEOs as predominantly men, often white. These aren’t predictions of the future so much as reflections of past, hidden patterns. And yet, given the importance and reliance we have on AI systems nowadays, having these stereotypes ingrained in such omnipresent tools helps to perpetuate these same stereotypes in society, which is exactly what we, along with others of HeyPeople!’s partners, have been trying to fight against.
Seeing the blatant bias in AI systems, and how they mirrored the unconscious bias in human minds, we decided to take a more agile approach, by shifting the focus to future action rather than essence: imagining the new narratives of work — jobs that don’t quite exist yet, that are a consequence of ultra-recent social, technological, environmental changes. By focusing on what could be rather than what has been, we opened up possibilities beyond the constraints of current categories and stereotypes.
In our work on Dear Future Manager, we took a more mediated approach, as we built a digital gamified experience that would be specifically for Gen Z users, a tool and framework opening up the conversation to Gen Z about the gender stereotypes harming the workforce.
We decided to set an approach that would empower the user to focus on their own agency and experience — to imagine it, to dream, to open up the field of possibilities. An easy-to-use, intuitive website inspired by the Instagram Stories format, we crafted ten questions that ask the user about their basic information, their age, their gender identification, professional and aspirational interests, while giving information, tips, and data points on equity in the workforce, and at the end, delivering a customized “cover letter” that serves as a reaffirmation of the user’s dreams and interests, a kind of “personal manifesto” for the changes they want to make.
Our goal was not to “box people in” — the focus was not on stating data points and statistics showing the presence of stark inequalities in the workforce, but rather we wanted to give a thinking, reflective, and dreaming voice to the user, a young adult, to imagine what doesn’t yet exist — the future ahead. Rather than reaffirming under-or-over-representation, the focus of Dear Future Manager was on the user’s future aspirations. The “cover letter”, without being the exact material one could use to apply to jobs with, instead places the onus on prompting conversations about one’s actions as moving beyond stereotypes.
Both Dear Future Manager and the workshop we did for HeyPeople! maintained this idea of the fantastical image as a real, existing tool and framework. Very often, we seek real-life solutions through perfectly pragmatic, “realistic” options. There is no doubt that young people, when they think about how they want to shape their adult life, will answer their questions through the lens of “realism” — just as we often, as children, imagine that to be an adult is to be rooted in the realistic conditions of the world. But pure imagination also has its part to play, and we realized that by uncovering the need to channel a certain spirit of playfulness through Dear Future Manager. Imaginative, creative work is a toolkit to move beyond set categories, to go past what is currently “here and there” and transcend, for a brief second, the stark realism we face in our everyday life.
This underscores the importance of imaginative thought-experiments, like mental, creative exercises to give to oneself in order to find an alternative way to reflect on one’s decision-making. There’s a certain beauty in letting your imagination take you outside of what seems possible in the present moment, like a muscle that needs to be exercised — not just for the sake of daydreaming, but as a tool to break what seems inevitable. When we’re caught in vicious cycles, whether personal or societal, it can feel like a maze, with no exit in sight — each turn leading back to the same starting point. But imagination creates a mental space where alternatives don’t just exist as abstract possibilities, but as powerful images to help guide us.
Of course, in this article, we’ve mainly talked about how exercises of imagination can help counter the act of demographics-based stereotyping and projection, as given in the context of our work in HeyPeople!. That being said — the problem of gender inequality in the workplace is a lot more complex than just gender stereotypes. Occupational segregation is responsible for 24 % of the gender pay gap but there’s still a lot of other issues and vicious cycles that cause the workplace to not be a fair space for all. Some other factors include: the glass ceiling, daily micro-aggressions, unequal distribution of domestic labor affecting career progression — plenty of elements that show that there’s still a lot of terrain to cover in terms of reaching gender equality.
And imagining future possibilities does not pretend to fully solve the problem of cultural determinism, or is it a one-size-fits-all solution. But the only way to genuinely move forward is to embrace the possibility of change, and with it, uncertainty. We will never be able to fully predict the future, and the ideas we imagine for it will always be more or less plausible prospects, not surefire events. Perhaps, in that case, the only way to make sure that you write your own narrative, as much as you possibly can, is to come to enjoy and find delight in the element of uncertain probability, yet maintain a steady, confident and certain trust in your own ability.
