This isn't about women. (Though it is about something that was suppressed for that reason.)

On why the language of 'the feminine' in business is worth sitting with, even if it makes you uncomfortable.

When I talk about the feminine in the context of branding, I want to be precise about what I mean. Because this isn't a conversation about gender. It isn't a claim that women are better at business, or that the future belongs to female founders, or that men should step aside.

It's a conversation about a mode of operating. A set of qualities.
An orientation toward work and relationship and meaning-making that has existed across cultures and throughout history, and that has, for reasons worth examining, been systematically devalued in the modern business world.

Those qualities include:

• intuition

• emotional attunement

• relationship-building

• cyclical thinking

• symbolism.

The willingness to sit in complexity and uncertainty rather than force premature resolution. The capacity to create belonging and shared meaning. The understanding that trust forms slowly and cannot be manufactured.

None of these are inherently female. Some of the most sophisticated practitioners of these qualities I've encountered have been men. Simon Sinek, for one, talks about building relationships and connection in business, how leadership isn’t about forcing, but supporting.

Another, Rick Rubin (one of the most celebrated creative producers of our time), talks about creative work almost entirely in this register.

He speaks of listening deeply, following resonance, trusting what feels alive, and allowing ideas to emerge rather than forcing them. He doesn't call it feminine. But it is.

We didn't dismiss these qualities because they were ineffective. We dismissed them because of who we associated them with.

The word 'feminine' here is doing something specific.

It's naming the historical pattern: that this group of qualities was coded as belonging to women, and because women were marginalised in professional life, the qualities were marginalised too.

Calling something 'soft' or 'fluffy' or 'not strategic' was, often, a way of saying: 'this feels too much like the kind of thing women do.'

Understanding that history doesn't require you to adopt a particular political stance. It simply requires intellectual honesty about how business culture was built, and what got left out in the process.

What I'm pointing to is an intelligence that business is now desperately trying to recover, because it turns out that the so-called soft stuff is where loyalty is built, where culture lives, where the long-term value of an organisation actually resides.

So when you hear the word 'feminine' and feel a flicker of resistance: that resistance is worth being curious about. Not because you're wrong to feel it, but because it might be pointing to exactly the thing this conversation is about.

The most strategic thing you can do is understand the territory clearly. Whatever language you use for it.