Somehow, I’ve become a person who reports on futurists. I produce and host a podcast about what might happen in the future called Meanwhile in the Future. I write a column about people living cutting-edge lives for BBC Future. And one thing I’ve noticed is how overwhelmingly male and white they are.

It turns out that what makes someone a futurist, and what makes something futurism, isn’t well defined. When you ask those who are part of official futurist societies, like the APF and the WFS, they often struggle to answer. There are some possible credentials—namely: a degree in foresight, an emerging specialty that often intersects with studies of technology and business. But the discipline isn’t well established—there’s no foresight degree at Yale, or Harvard. And there are plenty of people who practice futurology who don’t have one.

Zalman defines a futurist as a person who embraces a certain way of thinking. “Being a futurist these days means that you take seriously a worldview and a set of activities and the recognition that foresight, with a capital F, isn’t just thinking about what are the top 10 things this year, what are the trends unfolding.”

Frewen says that futurism won’t ever be like architecture or medicine, in that “it’s never going to be a licensed field.” But there are still things that many futurists agree people in their field shouldn’t do. “We think of things now as more systems-based and more uncertain, you don’t know what the future is, and that’s a basic concept, so we try to avoid the people who think they can always know this is going to get better.”

Some people think of science fiction authors as futurists, while others don’t. Some members of the APF include singularity researchers, others don’t want to. Some people lump transhumanists into a broader category of futurists. Others don’t. Here are some of the people popularly known as futurists: Aubrey de Gray, the chief researcher at the Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence Research Foundation; Elon Musk, the head of SpaceX; Sergey Brin, the co-founder of Google; Ray Kurzweil, the director of engineering at Google. They don’t necessarily belong to a particular society—they might not even self-identify as futurists!—but they are driving the conversation about the future—very often on stages, in public, backed by profitable corporations or well-heeled investors.

Which means the media ends up turning to Brin and Musk and de Gray and Kurzweil to explain what is going to happen, why it matters, and ultimately whether it’s all going to be okay. The thing is: The futures that get imagined depend largely on the person or people doing the imagining.

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Why are there so few women? Much of it comes down to the same reasons there are so few women in science and technology, fields with direct links to futurism (which has a better ring to it than “strategic foresight,” the term some futurists prefer).