FROM THE EDITOR
Silicon Valley thinks it came up with the ‘sharing economy’ – the utopian idea that somehow, if we all muck in together, we can share our cars, our homes and even our skills for the greater good of everyone. But women have known about the sharing economy for a lot longer than that. We’re hard-wired to share. We share our make-up bags with strangers in toilets, we share our highs (and lows) with colleagues at work, we share our battered hearts with friends we have known forever and our bold, resurrected sex lives with... well, sometimes those we have only just met. Women share because we know, almost instinctively, that it is emotional succour. We know that if we store it up and spread it around, it’s going to serve us well in the long run. Share your knowledge, share a delicious, succulent piece of gossip, or simply share a solid shoulder to cry on, and you connect, like pieces of a jigsaw, to something great and wondrous. You connect into the virtuous circle of woman. It is a club of sorts, yes, but not a club in the modern sense of the word. There is no imperial velvet rope on the outside and no snotty one-upmanship once you’re inside. There is only one simple access to entry and it is this: share what life has taught you in the hope that it will nourish others. This is the reason why women on this very magazine will share things you may not read anywhere else. It is the reason why our senior editor, Catriona Innes, has shared her story of growing up with a transgender parent, and why our junior writer, Jennifer Savin, has talked about her own experience of sexual consent and its myriad complexities. We share not because it’s what good journalists do, but because it’s what good women do. So the pieces of advice I’d like to pass on then are these: be kind. Be the first person to help and the last to take. Chastise in private, praise in public. And always, always admit when you’re wrong (and never shout about it when you’re right). They are simple, almost clichéd pieces of advice, but they work. They work because they have been passed down from women who have learned them all first-hand. And so I would like to add one last piece of advice: share. Share the good and the bad. Share it with no expectation other than perhaps, one day, it will help a woman out there who is in need of answers. Now that’s something even Silicon Valley couldn’t dream up.