Walking together: Gender Equality Futures 2042 in the Asia-Pacific region

Over sixty gender specialists met on October 19, 2022, at the Asian Development Bank (ADB) Headquarters in Manila to explore the futures of gender equality for ADB and the Asia and the Pacific region. Participants were guided through a futures thinking process by futurists Professors Ivana Milojević and Sohail Inayatullah. Dr. Susann Roth, Advisor and Chief of Knowledge Management at ADB, welcomed participants reminding them that the virus of “Nowism” was one of the greatest problems humanity faced. We need to nudge people toward the future (Sunstein and Roth, 2022). We needed to move, as Milojević would suggest, echoing the words of feminist thinker Elise Boulding (1995), toward a 200-year present – a present where the future of grandchildren was foremost in the policies being created today. Samantha Hung, ADB Chief of Gender Equality Thematic Group asked participants that today was the day to be bold, to create novel futures, to imagine outside the box and not be bogged down by day-to-day routine problem-solving.