When we talk about putting “feminist values” into practice in our businesses, which specific values are we actually talking about?
There’s also no definitive list of feminist values and feminist principles, and no ‘Feminist Authority’ to establish a common set that we all might use. Feminism is an expansive and complex view of how the world ought to be, an open-ended view with room for many different perspectives, so this lack of an authoritative core definition is not a mistake but instead an important feature of feminism.
And yet in order to write about feminist businesses and build tools that help us practice feminism at work, we need a simple, direct definition of the feminist principles that guide how we work together in organizations. So, I set out to make one for us.
In a much longer piece of writing, I describe the scholarly, abductive methods I used to create a working set of feminist principles and qualities that I ultimately proposed we use in feminist entrepreneurship. Shown here in this diagram, the five values of Equality, Agency, Whole Humanness, InterIndependence, and Generativity work together to help us create business systems that support flourishing. (I describe these values and how they work a bit more in Chapter 3 of my book, Feminism: A Key Idea for Business.)
If you’d like to download an image of these Values for Flourishing Feminist Business, along with a brief definition of each, please click here.
