Feminism

A Key Idea for Business and Society

Celia V. Harquail

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Topic: Business
• eBook ISBN:
  9780429851926
• Subtopic: Management
• Index: Business

In this concise book, feminist thought is made accessible and relevant to both students and management practitioners. An empowering introduction to an often-overlooked key idea, this book illuminates how feminist thinking can liberate our understanding of work and management.

Feminism: A Key Idea for Business and Society boldly challenges assumptions about both feminism and business. It offers a primer on feminism for business and explains feminist interventions including adding women's voices, pushing for equality, and practicing feminist values to make businesses more successful and more just. It analyzes the obstacles organizations and individuals face in their efforts to address gender inequality, and demonstrates how feminist interventions have changed the terms of business conversations around topics such as defining work, centering the economy around care, how jobs work and wages are gendered, violence in the workplace, horizontal and peer-to-peer organizational structures that don't depend on dominance, enlightened leadership models, and power. As this book demonstrates, feminism has already had a profound impact on business, with many of its key tenets incorporated into business thinking.

As one of the first books to offer feminist insights and critiques of business to the practicing manager, business student, and non-academic, this book offers a fresh, positive vision that is remarkably relevant.

1

A primer on feminism for business

Introduction

Feminism is a complex, comprehensive perspective on how the world ought to be that makes room for many points of view. And yet, to write about feminist critiques of business and envision a feminist future, we need a simple, direct definition of feminism and a set of core principles that feminists use to guide how we should work together in relationships, in society, and especially in organizations. This first chapter offers a working definition of feminism to serve as a catalyst for conversation, distinguishes between protective and constructive feminism, establishes the parameters of feminist issues, and introduces five feminist values that are most relevant to the challenges of people working together.

Defining feminism

Before we can understand how feminism contributes to business, we’re challenged to develop a common understanding of what feminism is. That’s harder than you might think, because it requires us to look at the world from an entirely different direction, to reconsider the nature of reality, to accept the ubiquity of diversity and the absence of objectivity, and to recognize and name the ways that conventional worldviews are designed to hurt some people and privilege others.

It’s difficult work, with a valuable payoff:

Once you learn to look at the business world through a feminist lens, everything you think you should do and that you might do to grow your people and your business will change. You’ll never be able to un-see oppression, and you’ll never again be able to accept the status quo as “good enough,” much less as “good,” period. You’ll no longer feel tempted to sit back and let others take up the challenge of advocating for justice, or leave it to others to envision and lead us towards a future where everyone flourishes.

Unfolding a working definition of feminism

Let’s start with a definition of feminism, and then step back to consider what this definition means in full.

The simplest definition of feminism comes from the scholar bell hooks (2000, p. 1), who writes “Feminism is a movement to end sexism, sexist exploitation, and oppression.” To this, I add: feminism seeks to establish political, social, and economic equality among women, men, and all people, and feminism aims to create a world where people flourish.

Feminism is a movement to:

• End sexism, sexist exploitation, and all oppression,
• Establish political, social, and economic equality, and
• Create a world where all people flourish.

To achieve these goals, feminism uses an array of tactics to reshape how we think about the world. For example:

• Feminism asserts that women, men, and all people should have equal agency, equal outcomes, equal rights, equal opportunities, equal access, equal influence, and ultimately equal and full personhood, so that everyone can participate in and shape our world.
• Feminism advocates the social, political, and economic equality of women, men, and all people, seeking equality among women and between women, men, and all human groups.
• Feminism values women and females, values the characteristics and abilities that have been labeled “feminine” and assigned to women, and values the work that has traditionally been associated with and assigned to women.
• Feminism imagines a world where the values, characteristics, and opportunities once ascribed to one gender or another are available to any person, regardless of gender.
• Feminism recognizes that current social, political, and economic systems hurt men as well as women, and it seeks the liberation of women along with the liberation of men and all people.
• Feminism emphasizes community, growth in connection, care, power through and in relationships, participation, democracy, and wholeheartedness, as well as individuals’ autonomy over their own selves and decisions.
• Feminism interrogates our beliefs about what is normal, what is right, and what is desirable, recognizing that too many of our current beliefs are built on a worldview that sees women, the feminine, the physical, the natural, and the emotional as secondary to the male, while the masculine, the cognitive, the built, and the logical are asserted to be more important.
• Feminism takes a unique position on how humans should be understood, how humans should work together, and how humans should produce the goods, services, and values that support lives and communities.

As a worldview, feminism is normative, because it asserts and clarifies how the world “ought to be,” and political, because it advocates we should govern, lead, manage, and organize our world around feminist values to achieve flourishing for all living things.

Feminism starts with “equality for women”

If you ask a random person on the street what feminism is, they’ll likely tell you it means “equality for women.” Usually, they are imagining women being equal to men, with no differences in the political and social rights, opportunities, access to resources, and autonomy of women and men. Through feminist action, and over time, what starts as an unequal status of men over women would even out as the status of women is improved. (Achieving this equality would require men to relinquish their power over women, although men’s responsibility to do so is seldom mentioned when the average person talks about “equality”). In this scenario, feminism achieves its goal when men and women have equality.

Aiming to be equal to men isn’t as simple as it sounds. A male standard assumes that there are no significant differences in rights, opportunities, and personhood among men. It assumes a generically privileged man, and ignores the very real disparities between different groups of men (e.g., gay men, disabled men, White men, poor men, etc.). Because we live in a world where ongoing racism, classism, imperialism, and other forms of oppression create disparities between groups of people, there is no generically privileged man to serve as a standard.

In truth, when people think about equality between men and women, they’re usually implicitly comparing women and men within the same social category, for example, by comparing upper-middle class men to upper-middle class women. Racism, classism, and other systems are hard at work diverting our attention away from other differences between groups of women and men, so that we don’t even recognize that we’re using a standard of equality that still permits inequality (see Box 1.1 for a discussion of how equality, parity, equity, and justice are different goals on the path towards eliminating oppression).

Feminism also means “equality among women”

Another way to think about “equality for women” is to look away from the assumption that the goal is becoming equal to men, and think about women becoming equal among themselves. Equality for women means equality among different groups of women, such as among women with different religions, among women with different nationalities, sexual orientations, gender expressions, and more.

In this scenario, feminist activism would raise up women of different groups until all women, regardless of their other social categories, had equal access to opportunities, resources, and rights.

“Nobody’s free until everybody’s free.”

Fannie Lou Hammer (1971)

By definition, feminism incorporates all anti-oppression movements, because women in different groups face different combinations of oppressions that all must be challenged to achieve equality. For women to be equal to each other, women must work for each other’s freedom. Working for one’s own freedom against the form of oppression that’s most salient to the individual is necessary, but it is not sufficient. As Audre Lorde (2007, 138), echoing Fannie Lou Hammer (1971), explains: “There is no thing as a single issue struggle, because we do not live single-issue lives.” Feminism is a collective movement, not only because feminism emphasizes interdependence and community, but also because feminists recognize they must address all forms of oppression to gain equality among women and people. Suggesting that feminism attends only to the needs of women, and not all people, is one way that the status quo has helped to turn some people away from feminism.

Combining these two standards of equality

If we put the two standards of equality together – equality among women, and equality between women and men – we’d have a scenario where women, men, and all people, regardless of their other social category memberships, all have the same rights, access, and outcomes. All have equal humanity and personhood.

That’s starting to look a little better, right? This definition of feminism is more inclusive, and it recognizes that group-based differences in rights, access, and outcomes need to be addressed if we hope to liberate women and all people.

But what if I tell you that, for feminists, equality just isn’t enough? This standard still puts a limit on how high the quality of human life can go. The very idea of bringing all women and men up to the same standard as societally privileged men rests on two additional, problematic assumptions. First, it assumes that what these men have achieved is what women and all people want. There’s no place in this definition for women and others to create expectations and standards from their own visions. Second, it assumes that privileged men have already imagined the most fulfilling standard of human life. If they haven’t, aiming for the same status as privileged men might be shooting a little low. Thus, feminists aren’t interested in getting everyone equal access to what privileged men have. Feminists believe there is more that humans can strive for, together.

Box 1.1 DISTINGUISHING BETWEEN PARITY, EQUALITY, EQUITY, AND JUSTICE

Feminists, as well as businesses trying to address the unequal experiences of male and female employees, use several different terms to describe their goals. These terms – parity, equality, equity, and justice – differ in subtle and important ways related to their historical contexts and the worldviews they convey.

• Parity: Parity is the goal of achieving the same proportions of women and men throughout an organization. It often refers to achieving the same percentage of women in leadership as women entering the company. For example, if the company is 25% women, then parity would suggest that 25% of managers would be women. If there were equal numbers of female and male managers, but 25% female employees and 75% male employees, there would be a bias towards women in management. As a matter of justice and representation, parity can be an important interim goal on the way to 50/50 representation of women and men.
• Equality: Equality is the goal of recognizing all people as having the same value and importance, deserving the same respect, and deserving the same level of positive outcomes.

The concept of equality is often split into three pieces: (1) equality of outcomes; (2) equality of value; and (3) equality of treatment. In a worldview that promotes ideas of meritocracy and individual effort and believes that systems are free of bias (e.g., neoliberalism), the goal of equal outcomes is a non-starter. Unequal outcomes are expected simply because people have unequal merit and put in un...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Endorsement
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction to feminist interventions in management and business
• 1 A primer on feminism for business
• 2 Obstacles and approaches to gender equality in business
• 3 Feminist interventions in core business concepts
• Conclusion
• Index