Partnership Studies 16: Women’s Leadership, Partnership Power, and Caring Economies
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): The Good Men Project
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2025/12/10
Riane Eisler, an Austrian-born American systems scientist, futurist, and human rights advocate, is renowned for her influential work on cultural transformation and gender equity. Best known for The Chalice and the Blade, she introduced the partnership versus dominator models of social organization. She received the Humanist Pioneer Award. Drawing on neuroscience and history, she argues that peace begins at home and calls for a shift in worldview to build more equitable, sustainable, and compassionate societies rooted in connection rather than control. The three books of hers of note that could be highlighted are The Chalice and the Blade—now in its 57th U.S. printing with 30 foreign editions, The Real Wealth of Nations, and Nurturing Our Humanity: How Domination and Partnership Shape Our Brains, Lives, and Future (Oxford University Press, 2019).
In this wide-ranging conversation, Scott Douglas Jacobsen speaks with Eisler about shifting from domination to partnership in politics, economics, and everyday life. Eisler explains that partnership leadership is not replacing men with women but empowering enlightened women and men to share “power to” and “power with,” grounded in care. She highlights Nordic nations, Ireland, and Canada as imperfect yet tangible examples of caring policy in action. Drawing on her refugee experience and global movements, Eisler argues that women’s organizing and expanded caring economies are essential if humanity is to move beyond regression and build sustainable, just societies.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: The partnership studies model of leadership is more subtle than people often stereotype it as in feminism and women’s leadership, because people tend to think in opposites. You point out repeatedly that the opposite of patriarchy is not matriarchy; it is partnership. When you are looking at women’s leadership, you are looking at women’s equality and at a more dynamic, integrated relationship in leadership with the men who are here now or will be in the future. It seems a more realistic and balanced view. It is less discussed because its integration points are not brought to the fore as much. Can you flesh that out in terms of what women’s leadership looks like?
Riane Eisler: There has been a big misunderstanding. Getting more women into leadership is not about replacing men. We are talking about enlightened men and women working together in a new model of leadership —a partnership leadership model —where decisions and power differ from those we have inherited, which come from the domination model—power over. This is a model grounded in a different kind of power, a power that we all have, women and men, which is power to our creative power, which is enormous. Everything we have, physical objects, is a human creation, and so are cultures, norms, and values. We can change, and we have changed. This model of leadership takes that into account. It is not only power to, but also power with. There are hierarchies in this model, but they are hierarchies of actualization rather than hierarchies of domination.
Power is therefore conceptualized differently. This model also recognizes—although this is cramming a great deal into one answer, and we can take it apart as we go—our interconnection at this level of technology, not only through communication and transportation, but through technologies of destruction like nuclear weapons and, more slowly, climate change. It also recognizes a principle commonly attributed to Albert Einstein: that we cannot solve problems with the same thinking that created them.
Jacobsen: How can women misstep when they enter that form of leadership? This is a new, experimental moment in contemporary history. How have women, when they have been in leadership, made mistakes similar to men when they have adopted a dominator persona?
Eisler: This is why my first answer focused on a different kind of leadership. There have been women who have used the same model of leadership—Margaret Thatcher, Catherine the Great (Catherine II of Russia)—because they stepped into leadership as defined by the old domination system. That is not what I am talking about. I am talking about a new, different model of leadership.
Jacobsen: How do we separate the wheat from the chaff? How do we distinguish men who are genuinely more enlightened—who have taken on that change of mind—from those who are essentially performing politically for votes?
Eisler: I think you know the answer to that. It is a change in consciousness, an understanding that we cannot continue with this in-group-versus-out-group leadership and the violence it entails. That violence is dangerous. It poses an existential threat to our survival as a species, not only quickly through nuclear weapons or biological warfare, but more slowly—yet surely—through the exploitation of nature, which is now rebelling against us.
Jacobsen: You have mentioned the Nordic nations as being pretty good at this. What parts did they implement earliest that showed they were moving effectively toward partnership?
Eisler: They implemented caring policies, meaning caring for ourselves, for each other, and for our life-support systems. They often call themselves caring societies, and they are not socialist states. That is a big misunderstanding. They have healthy market economies precisely because they also have caring policies—paid parental leave, which is publicly financed; affordable, well-compensated child care; and strong social supports. They are way ahead of the United States—which is moving backward at the moment—in caring for the natural environment. They lead in the adoption of new and non-polluting forms of energy. And they are not alone.
Ireland, for example, has moved very quickly toward the partnership end of the partnership–domination social scale. Canada, despite its frequent shifts in political leadership, is still ahead of the United States in efforts to phase out fossil fuels. We have to do this.
Caring for children and the household—the very work that both Marx and Adam Smith relegated to women to do for free in male-controlled households—is coming more and more to the fore in public understanding. And as AI advances, this is one of the few areas where human beings will continue to be essential: caring activities. I do not mean only health care or child care. I mean an entire expansion of care, including policies like a guaranteed annual income. Because what are people going to do as automation accelerates? Education for caring—for self, for others, and for our Mother Earth—is crucial.
Our relationship with the earth is exciting. There is a connection between women’s leadership and women’s historical exclusion from leadership, which is part of our heritage from more authoritarian, violent times. We certainly do not want to return to those times. Nor do we want to lose sight of the long periods in human history when societies were more oriented toward partnership than toward domination. The evidence for that is clear.
We have to be very creative now. Women’s creativity has been profoundly devalued. Being a parent is an innovative enterprise. Being a mother is lauded rhetorically, but not rewarded materially. In fact, it is often punished.
Jacobsen: I love the way you put that. That is very succinct. We laud it, but we do not reward it. Different cultural contexts may or may not take that road—or set of roads. In other regions of the world, paths differ from the Nordic or Northern and Western European trajectories. If you look at African states, East Asian states, Eurasian regions, and Latin America, what path would be likely for them if they were to move more in that direction regionally?
Eisler: I grew up in Latin America as a refugee from the Holocaust. My parents and I were able to purchase an entry permit to Cuba, and I grew up in the industrial slums of Havana. Things are changing slowly in Latin America, thanks, frankly, to the leadership and organization of women. The old saying is “Don’t agonize—organize.” And that does not only mean protesting. We are in a time of transition in which many movements are challenging domination: challenging the rule of kings, challenging the authority of men over women and children. All of these movements challenge domination. The same is true for challenging our dominion over Mother Earth, the peace movement, the movements against racism, and the movements for economic and political justice.
The current regression is a reaction to these challenges. That is what we must understand. Our task is to show that there is a better alternative. And women are organizing worldwide. We are in a time of transition, and we do not know which way the pendulum will go, but it has to move toward partnership if we are to survive and thrive. That is the issue.
Women are slowly entering the current economy as entrepreneurs, which they have to do. But our task—to use a woman’s metaphor—is not only to get a bigger slice of the existing economic pie, but to bake a better pie.
Jacobsen: Thank you for the opportunity and your time, Riane.
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