By Prof.Dr. Nuria Chinchilla, IESE Business School https://blog.iese.edu/nuriachinchilla/2022/12/mariacalvo/

Translated into English by deeptl.

On 22 November 2022, in a new session of the I-WiL Networking Lunch at IESE, we had the presence of María Calvo, president in Spain of EASSE (European Association of Single Sex Education), professor of Administrative Law at the University Carlos III of Madrid and author of numerous publications and conferences on the role of women in the society of the 21st century. Once again, we had the opportunity to enjoy her entertaining and rigorous presentation, full of reflections on female identity and the great challenges we all face.

The challenge of being a woman in the 21st century is the challenge of being oneself. To do so, it is necessary to recover and rediscover the essence of femininity. The question of what it means to be a woman today precedes the question of the challenges that such a condition entails. In turn, when a woman asks herself what the essence of being a woman is, she is asking herself about her own identity. The first challenge, and the most important from an anthropological perspective, is precisely the need to ask about the meaning of female identity. What has happened to make this question relevant in the society of the second millennium? As Maria points out, a new concept of the unrecognisable woman has appeared, a prototype with which identification is almost impossible.

Women today lack knowledge of our own identity, and this lack causes us indescribable discomfort: lack of self-knowledge is the greatest emotional failure a person can feel. The spread of gender ideology, by rejecting biological evidence and reducing femininity to a social and cultural construct, promotes a denaturalised and de-feminised society, in which women are stripped of their own essence.

The denaturalisation of women and the loss of their essence also leaves the role of men undetermined. The complementarity of the sexes disappears and leaves in its place a painful confusion in both sexes. The male figure is projected as toxic for the woman; the children, as a burden and the family, in short, is shown as a burden. Women are thus isolated, deprived of what, by biology and nature, is proper to them.

The challenge of being a woman today is to recover our identity in order to be able to contribute our own specific value to society, to the family and to the company. In this process of re-identification, men will also encounter the confused and blurred identity imposed by the gender perspective. To overcome this challenge, we must make a joint effort to defend authentic diversity, based on respect for the differences between men and women, on the recognition of the unique and unrepeatable value of each person. We must contribute to healing this sick society, which does not protect us, just as it does not protect children or the elderly.

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