Is there value in stating the obvious? Some will say no and retort with something like, “Oh, I know this already, what else is new?”
Easy, easy… Mr. Mainsplainer, we have some news for you. (Well, we hope men are reading this).
Because beneath truths so often repeated but not “heard” enough lie the biggest minefields of impact.
One such truth we will never tire of repeating is that the world as we know it today places an innumerable amount of social and economic barriers on women—specifically on women who wish to fulfill their potential, fan the tides of change in their respective industries, and reclaim their mantle as pioneers in a world so starved of their ideas.
Whether it’s the stuffy and suffocating workplace, the testosterone-jammed sports space, or the gruff and sweaty male-dominated tech and digital sphere, the 2020s leave much to be desired, remedied, and corrected in reference to female inclusion.
Let’s talk numbers, because cold, hard data speaks louder than dismissive eye rolls. In the tech startup ecosystem, women-led startups receive a pitiful 1.9% of total venture capital funding, while all-male founding teams rake in nearly 86% of investment dollars—a disparity that screams systemic bias louder than any boardroom whisper.
The entrepreneurial arena remains a battlefield where female innovators fight not just for funding, but for fundamental recognition. In tech, women represent only 26.7% of computing roles, a percentage that has barely budged in a decade. The gender pay gap remains a persistent wound, with women earning approximately 82 cents for every dollar men earn—a disparity that compounds over careers and generations.
Leadership roles tell a similar story: women occupy just 31.7% of senior management positions globally. These aren’t just statistics—they’re a blueprint of exclusion, a mathematical manifestation of institutional barriers that continue to push talented, brilliant women to the margins, constraining not just individual potential, but collective human progress.
At Lumina, this institutional rot is far from invisible (shock!) and is choking our airwaves (yelp). It begs, yells, and thirsts for a new, radical, and epoch-shifting approach to “innovation”—the territory where lasting change begins—to herald a new era of equity and inclusion in tech and entrepreneurship.
See, innovation is where the root of the problem lies. Hitherto, innovation has been male-dominated enough that every stage in the journey of innovation is shaped by masculine perspectives, masculine needs, and masculine prejudices (ew!).
Whether it is in idea generation or product testing, the great masculine triad pollutes all such spaces and squeezes out the tender touch of feminine wisdom from the train of innovation.
Notice how we said “train of innovation.” The challenges do not lie exclusively in one domain (or carriage), such as product testing, but in the entire ecosystem with all its nodes, networks, and subsystems. The rot begins not in the product, but in the spark that sets the proverbial train in motion—in other words, at the inception.
This is where it is vital to break down how innovation truly works and where its impact becomes most visible. Today, much of our innovation efforts are concentrated on designing fancy products that cater to female tastes. And so, we see no shortage of goods, products, and services that make a woman open her purse. But the problems never lay at the consumer end in the first place; they arose much earlier in the process.
When we study examples of groundbreaking innovation like Apple, Amazon, or Spotify, we notice they approached innovation differently. At the heart of their thinking wasn’t simply flaunting a glittering product to the consumer but revolutionizing the entire industrial landscape. Innovation occurred at every level of their processes, from production to distribution and beyond.
Spotify, for instance, didn’t simply cater to diverse musical tastes. It transformed the infrastructure in which music is produced, distributed, and sold. Innovation took place on a universal plane, reverberating across multiple domains and frontiers. Until innovation creates systemic change, we leave too much potential for impact untapped.
Our objective, therefore, must not simply be to shift the dials at the consumer level but to target the “central nervous system” of innovation—the point where creative sparks originate. This is what we call “radical innovation.”
But even radical innovation is not enough if femininity remains absent from the steering wheel of thought. Exit agnostic, trite, and bland “both side-ism.” Enter fem-centric innovation.
Recentering innovation in the cosmological map of the feminine is where the waves of potential will revive the wilting flower of modern-day male-dominated entrepreneurship.
What does this mean in practice? It means uncovering truths—psychological, anthropological, biological, and experiential—that differentiate the feminine from the masculine. Whether in granular details like bone density or deeper cognitive sensibilities, the feminine realm challenges assumptions underpinning male-centric innovation.
At Lumina, we focus not only on innovation as a process but also on the innovator. The brain cells that ignite the pistons of innovation matter as much as innovation itself. Together, they form a powerpuff dyad as inseparable as sodium and chloride in a restaurant kitchen.
Fem-centric innovation? The revolution begins today. The system may be sexist, but innovation doesn’t have to be.
