About Jane Evans
Jane Evans has always been a radical. In 1982, she started as an advertising creative and became one of the most successful women of her generation. She made the first ad with a divorced couple, the first with an unmarried couple living together, and the first where men did the housework and did it well. She launched James Squire, Australia’s first craft beer, and dreamed up the Tim Tam Genie, a campaign still running after more than 30 years.
When the industry decided she had aged out, she made midlife women her client. Her Uninvisibility campaign, the Visible Start programme, and her bestselling book with Carol Russell, Invisible to Invaluable, changed how the world talks about age and a woman’s worth. Now she runs the 7th Tribe, a platform where matriarchs gather to learn and organize.
Show Summary
In this episode, Jane Evans opens by brilliantly framing three things: the patriarchy is only 1.3% of human history, what was created by humans can be ended by humans, and the women to end it are here right now.
For 40,000 years before Hammurabi carved his laws into stone in 1792 BCE and made women the property of men, civilization ran on women’s inventions: brewing that made water drinkable, then agriculture, then the trade and cities that followed.
The women to end it are the matriarchs. Not a mother or a grandmother, but the most senior women present in a power structure. For the first time in history, women occupy positions of power their ancestors never could.
The 7th Tribe is the place she built for matriarchs to gather and organize. She made it off-platform because the algorithms bury midlife women, and she has proof. In early 2025, the Trump administration ordered federal agencies to drop hundreds of words tied to women, race, and DEI. Jane built a post out of those banned words, then coordinated an experiment: several people posted the same content at the same moment. She reached 8% of her audience. A man in the group reached 143% of his.
Her method for taking the patriarchy apart is heretical. You love it to death, because confrontation is itself a patriarchal move. She points to a 2000 UCLA study that found a third response to threat beyond fight or flight: tend and befriend. Loving the patriarchy to death is tend and befriend applied to power. You don’t meet the threat head-on, because force is the patriarchy’s home turf. You disarm it instead, get close, befriend it, and change it from the inside.
In the Second Show, Virginia and Justin shared two provocative points:
Virginia made the point that the current activist playbook is flawed because the activism of the 1960s and 70s is itself patriarchal. It borrows the patriarchy’s own tactics of marching and confrontation, so it reinforces the system instead of breaking it. What works instead is humor and originality, because changing the narrative changes how people treat each other, and that is what changes the system.
Justin opined that the patriarchal structures the progressive left claims to oppose are sustained by their version of “purity culture,” which functions similarly to purity culture in conservative evangelicalism. Evangelical purity culture shames anyone who fails its sexual standard as permanently damaged goods. The left runs the same shame-and-exclusion machine on ideology: one impure position, and you’re branded unworthy. Both are intended to sustain oppressive power, not dismantle it.
Key Takeaways
Only two species go through menopause: humans and whales. In orca and pilot whale pods, the females who lead are the old ones, the matriarchs who have lived long enough to know where the food is and how to survive the lean years. Women now live that same long stretch past menopause, and Jane says those are the years built for leading, not for disappearing.
A woman over 50 with a partner and two children has direct loving influence over 120% of the population. Jane wants women to drop the left-right divisions and unite around the one thing they all share: protecting children. Once women unite, that loving influence turns into power.
Skip the head-on fight with powerful men and ask them about their legacy. Jane points to historian Rutger Bregman, who challenges billionaires at Davos to point to the good they will leave behind. The question disarms the ego instead of feeding it.
One nonviolent protest any woman can run: stop saying Israel and call it the Holy Land, because the Holy Land belongs to everyone. When millions of women make the same small word choice, it sends a message no single march could.
Midlife women feel when something is wrong before they can explain why, and Jane treats that intuition as a reason to act. The 7th Tribe started there. It gave those feelings words, the sense that the world is getting worse for our children, and turned them into organized action.
