A Feminist Business is an Anti-Racist Business

In my work with businesses and leaders, I practice an expansive, radically inclusive feminism.

Our feminist practice asks us to address all systems of oppression, using our understanding of gendered, racialized, and classed dynamics to work for a world where all people, all living creatures, and our planet can flourish. 

Feminist businesspeople understand that all systems of oppression -- especially sexism, White supremacy, settler colonialism, heterosexism, ableism, nativism, and capitalism --  reflect the same fundamental lie: that some humans are better than others, that some humans deserve more than others, that some humans should profit by controlling and taking from others.

We believe that the practice of feminism calls us to support the leadership of many different activists and movement groups. Especially now, we reaffirm our commitments to support, to act with, and to learn from the leadership of the #BlackFeminists activists at the heart of BLM/M4BL.

“A feminist business embraces all forms of anti-oppression work.

A feminist business is an anti-racist business.

A feminist business is an anti-homophobia business.

A feminist business fights White supremacy and settler colonialism.

A feminist business supports indigenous reconciliation.

A feminist business pays employees life-sustaining wages and pays investors fair returns.

A feminist business establishes “success” and “value” on its own terms, with the needs of all in mind.

A feminist business pursues social justice and financial return, unwilling to sacrifice either goal.  ”

We are in the midst of a tremendous, accelerating call for social change.  

Businesses and business people must respond. Because business sets political, social, and cultural priorities and shapes our daily personal and community lives, business is a critical place for us to focus our advocacy for justice.  

Ideas that conventional business people dismissed as “too radical” are now being taken seriously.  Universal Basic Income. A Citizen’s Dividend.  Defunding the Police.  Indigenomics. Social finance reform.  All around us we hear and are participating in a growing discussion of how to promote social equity in business.

It’s long been suggested that we invest  in businesses owned and led by womxn from all identity  groups, by marginalized men, and by all marginalized people. Certainly, expanding the diversity of business owners and leaders is important for increasing the representation of all people in our economy. Along with increasing representation, other progressive business initiatives, like social enterprise, triple bottom line businesses, cooperatives, and sustainability are each important to social justice.

However, we understand that a feminist business approach, one that includes and incorporates all of these progressive initiatives, will help us transform business to support the society, the economy, and the collectively-flourishing life we imagine. 

The uprisings of the last few weeks have brought forward a long overdue recognition that each of us and every business must take explicit action to fight anti-Blackness and racism.

Where does this put us as members of a feminist business community? How does being part of a feminist initiative help us and our businesses participate in these efforts? 

Feminists, and especially feminists who are white, must speak even more clearly to promote a full-fledged, inclusive, expansive, embracing feminist analysis — and right now especially, to promote the mutually-reinforcing, mutually dependent understanding of oppression and liberation celebrated by #BlackFeminism.

A feminist business embraces all forms of anti-oppression work.

A feminist business is an anti-racist business.

A feminist business is an anti-homophobia business.

A feminist business fights White supremacy and settler colonialism.

A feminist business supports indigenous reconciliation.

A feminist business pays employees life-sustaining wages and pays investors fair returns.

A feminist business establishes “success” and “value” on its own terms, with the needs of all in mind.

A feminist business pursues social justice and financial return, unwilling to sacrifice either goal.  

We believe that a feminist approach helps any business and especially womxn-led/owned businesses succeed not simply because this approach helps you run your business better. We believe that a feminist business approach creates space for you as founders and for your businesses to experiment and explore so that instead of reinforcing an oppressive status quo you’ll work to change it. Because a feminist approach helps you understand how to address a full range of social equity challenges, you and your company will be able to lead the business response to society’s imperatives.  

A feminist business embraces all forms of anti-oppression work.

This conviction is why Petra and I and others are working with a feminist business accelerator, why Lex and others are working to support feminist founders, and why many other feminists are ramping up their commitment to feminist business practice.

In our work, feminist business people make space for the conversations we need to have about focusing on social justice as a business. We investigate the role that confronting not just gender but all forms of oppression can play in designing products, services, operational policies, organizational norms, leadership styles, and outcomes. We believe that these conversations around gendering and radical inclusivity/intersectionality/ multiple systems of oppression develop our capacity to address any form of injustice.

Even more, these conversations open up our minds and hearts in ways that lead us and our companies to new ideas, product or service innovation opportunities, new markets, relationships and differentiators that are impossible to imitate and that are critical to creating a just economy.

The feminisms we draw from today are rooted in a deep legacy of thinking, practice, leadership and wisdom.  These ideas and practices reflect the experiences and the vision of (at least) half the world’s population. They are appropriate to -- maybe even purpose-built-- for the imperatives we face today. 

Of course, feminism is just one of many movements focused on equality, equity and social justice. Many social movements can and should inform what business leaders and companies do now and what they do next. It’s important to remember that feminist uses an analysis of gender and sex-focused oppression to expose the pattern of all oppression, exposing the lie that any one group of humans should have power over other groups. 

Feminism uses the vision of gender and sex equality to promote the fundamental human truth: that all people are equally valuable, all people and communities have the right to decide how their lives should unfold, and all people equally deserve to flourish.

Feminism is not the only social movement that can serve as a good teacher to business. However, while feminism intersects with and embraces almost all progressive movements, feminism remains the only movement that insists we value men/males, women/females, and people of every gender as equals, as equally human and worthy of care. 

All of us are on different learning paths when it comes to thinking about how social justice and business fit together.  We start from different positions. We benefit from different privileges. We are hampered by different experiences of a range of systemic oppressions. We have different cultures, personalities, and visions to express. We will take different routes as we push for work, jobs, businesses, products, services, and an economy that is anti-racist, anti-sexist, anti-colonialist, anti-extraction, and anti-any oppression.

We understand that all of us feminists — entrepreneurs, all founders, all business owners, all mentors/consultants/coaches, all employees, all investors — will need to engage in deep personal work and organizational leadership work.  Business people and companies who do this work will respond to society’s clear call for equality. And, they will create more capable and stronger businesses that move use towards flourishing for all.

(Thanks to Petra Kassun-Mutch for her help in scoping out this post.)

Mini-book: Bringing Feminist Practices into Online Work Sessions

By popular demand — actually, by the request of my Feminist Enterprise Commons colleagues — I’ve expanded on the two-page handout of Feminist Practices for Online Work and turned it into a mini-book.

This mini-book has twenty tips plus a discussion of the feminist thinking that supports each suggestion. The mini-book also includes a recap of the Five Feminist Values for Business, drawn from the Feminist Business Model Canvas and my book. It’s eighteen pages in total— you can print it out full-size, or print two pages per sheet for a compact version.

Click this link to download the mini-book:

Bringing Feminist Practices
into Online Work Sessions

And, consider signing up for my email newsletter on Feminism and Business!

Bringing Feminist Practices Into Your Online Meetings

Let's be purposeful as we transfer our work into online meetings — by adding #FeministBusinessPractices. Here are 16 practices we've been experimenting with to demonstrate #FeministValues online.

Click on this link for a downloadable, two-page pdf.

Bringing Feminist Practices Into Your Online Meetings

Taking a Feminist Experience Online: Some resources

As part of my work to create some online events that are informed by feminist values and practices, I’ve put together a resource list of webinars and downloadable publications where you can learn more about how to translate feminist values and feminist facilitation methods into the online world of Zoom, GoToMeeting, and the like.

The six online workshops are all being hosted by groups and people already involved in social justice work, so it shouldn’t be too hard to add a few feminist values to these if you don’t see them already in action. The downloadable guides describe online and offline facilitation practices that address social justice issues in group experiences. Again, these guides should help to surface issues that you’ll want to address as you move your group interaction even more online.

While I haven’t fully vetted the workshops (since some of them haven’t happened yet) I feel confident in the the groups and people who are hosting them. I’m looking forward to the events themselves (maybe I’ll see you there?).

Please let me know in the comments or via email if you see additional workshops and guides that I should add to these, and if you have any other insights to share!!

(Download by clicking title, below)

Resources for:
Creating Online Events from a Feminist Perspective

Transforming to a Feminist Economy

On March 9 I’ll be speaking at the SheEO Global Summit, about Transforming to a Feminist Economy.

This list, below, has some resources for participants and readers who want to learn more about feminism and business, the Feminist economy, and systems change

Connect with these websites:

Cvharquail.com

LiisBeth.com

FeministsAtWork.com

FeministFounders.co (Sally Bingham’s directory of feminist businesses, mostly Canadian)

READ:

Feminism and Business:

Feminism: A Key Idea for Business, Celia V. Harquail, (Routledge, 2020)

Feminine Capital: Unlocking the Power of Women Entrepreneurs, Barbara Orser and Catherine Elliot (Stanford Business Books, 2015).

Beauty Shop Politics: African American Women's Activism in the Beauty Industry by Tiffany M. Gill, University of Illinois Press, 2010).

The Feminist Bookstore Movement: Lesbian Antiracism and Feminist Accountability, by Kristen Hogan  (Duke University Press, 2016).

What are Feminist Businesses? What are Feminist Business Practices?  By CV Harquail https://medium.com/@cvharquail/what-are-feminist-businesses-what-are-feminist-business-practices-a9a48d276cbc

Listen to a podcast of (En)Gendered with Teri Yuan (Episode 72) https://engendered.us/episode-72-cvharquail-on-feminism-a-key-idea-for-business-and-society-part-1-of-2/

Feminism and Economics

The politics of the solar age: Alternatives to economics, by Hazel Henderson, (Anchor Press/ Doubleday, 1981)

If Women Counted: A New Feminist Economics, by Marilyn Waring, (HarperCollins, 1990)

Counting on Marilyn Waring: New Advances in Feminist Economics, Second Edition, by  Margunn Bjørnholt & Ailsa McKay (Demeter Press, 2014)

Beyond Economic Man: Feminist Theory and Economics, by Marianne A. Ferber & Julie A. Nelson, (University of Chicago Press, 1993)

The Age of Thrivability: Vital Perspectives and Practices for a Better World, by Michelle Holliday ( Cambium, 2016). See also Michelle’s Website: https://ageofthrivability.com/

Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist, by Kate Raworth  (Chelsea Green Publishing, 2017) * Lex Schroeder’s favorite

Who Cooked Adam Smith's Dinner?, by Katrine Marcal (Pegasus Books, 2017) * Lex Schroeder’s favorite

Liberating Economics: Feminist Perspectives on Families, Work, and Globalization, by Drucilla Barker&  Susan F. Feiner (University of Michigan Press, 2004)

Fortunes of Feminism: From State-Managed Capitalism to Neoliberal Crisis, by Nancy Fraser (Verso Books, 2013)

Feminist Economics: Theoretical and Political Dimensions, Astrid Agenjo-Calderon & Lina Gálvez‐Muñoz, in American Journal of Economics and Sociology, Jan 2019.
Free Access: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/ajes.12264

On Systems Change

Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System, by Donella Meadows http://donellameadows.org/archives/leverage-points-places-to-intervene-in-a-system/

Move As If Women Are Half the World and You Are Part of Something Larger, by Lex Schroeder (2018) https://medium.com/@lexschroeder/move-as-if-women-are-half-the-world-and-you-are-part-of-something-larger-a2e195d36ccd

Feminist Businesses Observe the Laws of the Earth, by Lex Schroeder (2019) https://medium.com/@lexschroeder/feminist-businesses-observe-the-laws-of-the-earth-feminist-entrepreneurs-can-learn-from-how-bf4c228926c2

What is "Feminism at Work" as a practice or goal?

More notes, from 6 June 2015!

What is Feminism at Work?

• Feminism at work is not the same as adding more "women in business".

• Feminism at work is not the same as welcoming or including "feminine" traits into the ways that we think about leadership or good management.

• Feminism at work is the ongoing process of leading together to change the systems in our workplaces,

  • by developing and using feminist business practices and behaviors by transforming conventional business practices so that they reflect feminist values (e.g., using different kinds of decision-making tools in our everyday work, applying different norms to our evaluations of effective or good behavior)

  • using the analytic tools, frameworks, vocabulary, and history of intersectional feminism as a body of thought and as a guide for practice.

• Feminism at work is aimed at changing the system of work, not just advancing one woman's place (or your place) in that system.

• Feminism at work is aimed at improving the experience of work, the experience of employment, and the social value of work, not just for your kind of women or men, but for everyone.

• Feminism at work means envisioning a different kind of organization – a different kind of work structure – and a different kind of business activity, as well as a different kind of economics. 

  • This would mean going beyond simply adding women, or diversity, or increasing the range of people representing different social cultures within a work culture. 
    It will require inviting democratic engagement and active collective leadership in transforming the business.

• Feminism at work, for an individual, means working as an allied agent of change, not as a lone "change agent" or as an angry "advocate", or even as a traditional "leader".

• Feminism at work means leads to reorganizing power, authority, and responsibility. It includes changing the way we think about who earns what, who contributes what, how different kinds and amounts of contribution are valued, and how that contribution is related to ownership of the business itself. 

• Feminism at work emphasizes equality, mutuality, relationships, interdependence, and justice.

• Feminism at work means always using the term "women" in the most complex, inclusive, and intersectional way.  It means to use an analysis of gendered power dynamics as a fundamental but not the only lever for change.

The interesting stuff you find when you’re reorganizing your file cabinet!

Feminism, Work, and Power

Feminism at work aims to resolve all forms of oppression that are reflected in work processes, work culture, and work products.  (“Oppression” is the unjust allocation and use of systemic and institutionalized power (within the organization, society and the economy). When people exert authority over others through oppression, their use of power is illegitimate. It lacks the consent of those towards whom it is directed as well as those who aim to deploy it.)

It can be hard to address questions of "power" in work organizations, specifically, because:

— Some differences in authority and responsibility within a business remain important and necessary.

For example, owners, shareholders, customers, clients, employees, and stakeholders all have different relationships to getting things done and creating value. Some roles require more expertise than other roles. This expertise should be recognized by the scope and responsibilities of different roles within a business.  [note: not everything has to be the same in order for their arrangements to be just and fair.]

-- The pressures of making "enough" money to survive and thrive make it hard to question how power and responsibility are currently organized in business.

-- A certain form and structure of power is consistently legitimated by large social, commercial, and cultural structures (such as the banking system, the stock market, tax regulations, the nuclear family).  These larger structures are all designed to sustain the conventional (non-feminist) understanding of business and the economy.

-- The constant demand to "get things done" or "serve customers" makes having the time to process democratic decisions and experiment with more democratic relationships within a business seem like a luxury. (Emphasis here on "seem like”.)

-- If we stumble or fail to make a good product as we transform our workplace, our businesses might not be able to meet expenses, and we & our colleagues (aka employees) might not be able to pay rent and feed our families. Businesses need to be both economically sustainable and socially just/sustainable.

-- In businesses, there are many ways that participants can exit an organization or be forced out of an organization in order to slow that organization’s transformation to a more just structure.  When so many exits are open and not under our control, especially when they are used as threats to keep us from advocating for change – it can be hard to get commitment to change. 

-- It is hard to learn now to be a feminist at work because businesses don't send us to feminist training camp.

-- The examples, case studies, etc. of organizations that are transforming power relationships and responsibilities to make them more democratic & just often seen seem so far outside "the business case" that they don't seem to apply to ongoing businesses. This makes these examples easy to reject as irrelevant, when instead they should be used to help us learn. 

When feminism is at work in a business, we care about:

-- What is produced.
Is this product meaningful? Is the need it fills really important?

-- How the product affects us and others. 
Does the provision of the product or service serve interdependence and agency, or does it encourage dependency?
Does it treat customers like flawed objects or fully whole human beings? 

Does the product add real value? Does it serve an important need?
Does the product help us care for each other?

— How the product is marketed.
What does the product promise? Does this promote health and justice?
What does this product actually deliver, in terms of function and social impact?

-- How the product affects the material world.
Does the product itself create waste? Or pollution? Does the process of making the product damage the environment or damaged the relationships of people involved in making?

Feminism at work is concerned with changing how things are made and how services are provided.
This includes not only the ‘efficiency’ of the production system but also the externalities (or impact) of the production process.

Feminism at work is concerned with the division of labor and with work systems within the business. Simple things like scheduling, flexibility, and job design can be reconsidered from a feminist perspective.

Feminism at work is concerned with creating and fairly distributing value, and this with costs, profits, wages, prices, and ownership – anything related to money, who gets it and who earns it.

Feminism at work is concerned with the humanity of “human resources" even while it questions the idea of human beings as resources or as capital that can be exploited by a business to increase profits for owners. 

Feminism at work is concerned with how people are hired, trained, promoted, paid, and retired/exiting from the business.

Feminism at work is concerned with how we partner with other businesses, and with other organizations. We think about our partners, our network, our community, our neighborhood, and even our competitors, do we work to have respectful, honest, and mutually beneficial relationships with them?

Feminism at work is concerned with how we treat each other at work. Do we challenge conscious and unconscious bias in our own behavior and in the behavior of others? Do we encourage respectful and caring relationships with each other? Do we recognize and encourage the full humanity of the people with whom we work?

Feminism at work is concerned with how we feel about ourselves when we are at work, and when we are not at work. Does our workplace support our own personal health and well-being? Does it promote our growth? Does it promote positive relationships with our families, and with our larger community?

---

What can feminist advocates do at work to promote feminist practice in their businesses?

• We can make feminist leadership development a conscious part of our business building strategy.

• We can make sure that, over time, all members of our organization or of our business have leadership opportunities and leadership development opportunities.

• We can create collective (as opposed to individual) models of leadership and leadership structures

• We can consciously reflect on the relationship between leaders and "followers" so that both groups have active responsibility to each other.

We’ll need to challenge and change our assumptions about women (and men, and all people) so that we can all be more feminist at work.

The assumptions we need to challenge include beliefs:

• That women will "naturally" know how to do feminist business-- even better than men will know. (Note: feminist behavior is not "natural" to women and not “unnatural” to men or people who are not women. Feminist business practice is learned behavior that we can teach and learn with each other.)

• That we can learn simply by doing and by caring. Instead, we have to recognize that we need structures, time, and facilitation for learning and experimenting.

• That we are all equally skilled. (And that differences in skill make some people more important people than others.)

• That we will all find it easy to agree.

• That we will all understand the feminist vision for the business.

• That we will all agree with the goal of a feminist business, and of our feminist business in particular.

• That will be willing to expose ourselves, and be vulnerable, as we try new practices and learn new ways of thinking about what we are doing together at work.

• That we'll all be okay with giving up the disproportionate privileges we have, so that everyone is privileged and respected as a member of the community.

• That we’ll be able to resolve material conflicts fairly, or easily. (e.g., It's not necessarily easy for me to reduce my 3X salary to a 2x salary, so that you can go from a 1X salary to a 2X salary.)

What We Believe About Working Together In A Feminist Business

At a book talk recently, a member of the audience asked if I could describe what work life might be like in a feminist business. As a group, we riffed on that question to explore what we’d like the world of work to be using the feminist values that were alive among that specific group of folks.

The conversation reminded me, though, of a document I sketched out years ago. Sitting by my fireplace one snowy afternoon in February of 2016 I free-wrote these ideas, below. Do they sound like a worthy vision for a feminist business?

What We Believe About Working Together In A Feminist Business

All people are equal

All people are equally valuable

All people have an equal role in envisioning the future

We value the whole self: physical, spiritual, and emotional

Relational labor is productive labor

Parenting is valuable work

Care work is valuable work

Enabling and teaching others is valuable work

Care and performance both matter

Work, rest, and recreation all matter

Work needs to work with human nature not against it

Work should be designed to fit all of us, not just one "ideal worker" 

All parts of our bodies need to be respected at work

What we create should be aligned with nature, both human nature and the earth

We respect the individual as an agent, not an object

Experience is valuable

We are accountable to the community and other individuals

We are aware of each person's position, values, and politics

We are responsible and responsive to each other

Work and jobs are gender-neutral

We have truly genderless career paths

We don't have or reinforce a masculine/feminine binary

We're concerned with transforming gender roles, relationships, boundaries, and definitions

Our workplace should be physically and emotionally comfortable

Our workplace should be welcoming and feel inclusive to all

Our workplace should take care of our bodies

Work should be empowering 

We support creativity and active problem-solving

We set our own definition of “success”

We want to change things and improve them

All forms of work matter, all work should be meaningful

Our work processes, work roles, and work systems have to be sustainable 

Our work needs to contribute to the community 

Our work must renew us even as we put ourselves into our work 

We actively reflect on how our values and beliefs influence us 

We question what it means to improve, succeed, contribute, perform

We grow in connection and through relationship with others

Our relationships are equitable

We're accountable to others, we are mutually accountable

Our work relationships reflect empathy, love, and care

People aren't widgets, they're not substitutable for one another

We have an ethical commitment to others

We are cooperative

We seek agreement, consensus, and consent to make decisions

We ask for each other's consent in an ongoing way versus contracting it just once

We participate in a way that builds relationships with others

Value is created collectively

Value should be shared among everyone who contributes

Everyone shares in the benefits and burdens of this organization

We acknowledge, expect, and value pluralism – that there are many views and experiences, all valid

We see our organization as part of a larger system that our organization needs to contribute to in positive ways

We are aware of the ecosystem around us

We take a holistic view: all issues are connected

Everything and everyone in the system matters

The health and flourishing of the larger community and the larger system matters

We work to support the whole system, not just what appears to fall within our boundaries

Leadership is an activity, not a personal quality

Organizations and activities can be decentralized because everyone can contribute and take responsibility

Hierarchy can be minimized because everyone can contribute and take responsibility

We emphasize the network, not just pairs of person-to-person relationship

We use our voices to share our experience and point of view 

We advocate for what we believe is right

We are oriented towards a purpose

We have a big picture vision

We want to change how the world works to make it better

We want to bring about political emancipation – where people actively influence what happens versus passively risks or just respond

We don't want to produce or profit from social inequality

We want to change the system

Every perspective is a perspective from somewhere in the system and it matters where perspectives come from

As an organization, we have active positive relationships with the community

We make a positive contribution to the community 

We have a mutual relationship to the community

We have mutually supportive relationships with each other

We see our stakeholders as partners

We seek to create positive relationships between our organization and others

We want our company to be a positive influence on others

We focus on and value group process

We emphasize participation in democracy

We emphasize self-knowledge, self-disclosure, and honest constructive communication

Conflict can be healthy

We can be self organizing. No group, person, or role has power over others without collective consent

We create power with each other to work together

We value the personal development and learning of each individual

Work gets done through social relationships

We want to be empathic and compassionate in our interactions with each other

Everyone should have access to the tools they need

Tools should fit our bodies. 

Tools should help our work not increase our work

Things take time. We respect the process

Business Models That Design Generosity Into Ownership and Profit

If you want to build generosity into the core logic of your organization, the best way to do this — by far — is to build generosity right into your business model.

(from 2016)

By making sure that your ownership structure, your revenue generating systems, your profit/revenue sharing systems, and your legal obligations all support a generous orientation towards your stakeholder network, you can make sure that generosity is always ‘how you do business’.  It’s not as hard as you might imagine to retrofit your business model or to build your startup on top of one. m

Business models as a concept feel rather dry, so even though generous business models are a *huge* opportunity for an organization seeking to be generous, they can be hard to talk about in ways people find interesting.  Sure, you dedicated and curious readers might relish a few hundred words about cooperatives, employee-owned corporations, B Corps, social enterprises, and “For Purpose” businesses per se.  But to capture the attention of most readers, I’ve been relying on somewhat dramatic examples. Like the norm-challenging MLNP.tv, or the heart-full LoveWithFood. I imagine that the novelty of these companies is part of what draws readers in, so I’ve been wanting to use fresh, new examples of companies people don’t know about.

That’s why I was both excited and nervous to see a profile of Stocksy in the New York Times last month.  I’m excited because I love the company, and I’m nervous because I worry that by the time I get the book published everyone will have heard about Stocksy and its qualities won’tseem novel and exciting to readers any more. (Actually, I worry about this with all of my examples. Once upon a time, I had to explain what Airbnb was… !)

Stocksy is one of the very best examples of companies with a business model built on generosity.

It’s not just its legal model (a co-op), its ownership structure (tiers of owners, including managers, artists, and employees), or its revenue model (50/50 split) but also it’s the company’s collaborative decision making structure, its artistic purpose, and its efforts to lead the stock photo industry, that make Stocksy a thoroughly generous business. And, it’s been financially successful too.

Stocksy’s got it all going on.

I first got wind of Stocksy back in March of 2014, around its first birthday.  I was looking online for some nice stock photos for AuPairMom, and I followed a link from a photo that I’d admired on another blog. As is probably true for many of their customers, I was attracted by the aesthetics of the photos it offers — so much more hip, more lovely, and more evocative than the generic imagery that’s available elsewhere. From Stocksy’s About page, I learned it was a coop… and I’ve been following the company ever since. 

In November, I got to hear CEO Brianna Wetlaufer talk about Stocksy’s cooperative structure at the Platform Cooperativism Conference at The New School, NYC, last November. 

[[The platform cooperative movement advocates for new ownership structures for digitally-based businesses. "Platform" cooperativism is premised on the idea that, when users are creating the content and the data that drive the profits of a company, these users should be recognized as co-creators and share in the profits, the decision-making, and the ownership of the company. Users are, after all, indispensable to the production process, so why shouldn't they also own some of the means of value production?]]

What I particularly love about Stocksy’s approach is that they’ve got a “Multi-stakeholder” shared ownership structure, with three different groups of stakeholders all sharing ownership and decision-making. Participant artists, managers/founders, and employees each have a class of stock and a set of responsibilities for their own work as well as for the company at large. Stocksy also has a self-designed, continually evolving conversation and decision-making processes to encourage participation and transparency.  Stocksy is a terrific example of a company built around MPFollett’s classic concept of “power with”. 

If you’d like to see more about Stocksy, you can read the rough draft of a section from Give To Grow on Generous Business Models.  Here’s the article from the NYT.   I’d love to know what strikes you as exciting, or confusing, or worth hearing more about.

Stocksy is proof that alternative, generous business models exist and that they offer a foundation for a company and its stakeholders to flourish together.

cvh 

How Do We Know If That Business Will Help Women?: Implicit "Theories of Change" that folks don't want to acknowledge

One of our Entrepreneurial Feminist Community members, Petra Kassun-Mutch, was recently called out for suggesting that a government organization’s strategy for investing in “women led and women owned businesses” might be falling short of its overall goal of improving the economic situation for women and gender non-binary citizens. Petra was questioning whether the nominal criteria being used to certain that a company is benefitting some has any relationship at all to producing outcomes that support women.  (For example, does one woman on an executive team of 8 really make that company work on women’s behalf?

This is an incredibly important issue.

I’d argue that, in the main, the qualities used and the amounts necessary to qualify are close too pitiful. As in, nearly meaningless. Or, more positively, “extraordinarily optimistic”. 

The commonly-accepted criteria for being ‘women oriented’ seem slight, insignificant, easy to game, and — most importantly — without a ‘theory of change’.

A theory of change is a simple explanation, a cause-and-effect statement that describes how the action you’re pursuing will ultimately make a difference.

My theory of change is that if I add salt and baking powder to pancake batter, the gas released by the acidic interaction will inflate the batter with tiny gas bubbles, causing the batter to lift and rise, ultimately creating a puffy cake instead of a flat cracker.  The theory of change directly explains how my action (adding salt) causes the outcome (puffy cake) because of an actual mechanism (additional gas bubbles raise the batter as it’s cooked).

Most of the criteria used by groups wanting to invest in businesses that will in some way help women (and/or reduce important gender gaps) are features — not actions. They are the equivalent of having “1/2 tsp salt” on the ingredient list of the recipe. Not necessarily acting in the batter. Just on the list. 

Investor criteria count the number of women featured, as owners or as executives (and sometimes as customers). They do not assess what these women are doing, whether their actions are influential, and whether their influences actually help women. They lack a theory of change. 

What is the mechanism of change that these investors are assuming as they select companies to invest in? 

I’m not sure if they even know. So, I thought I’d put together a preliminary chart to begin to make these theories of change more explicit.     See the table “Levels of Change Potential Based on Funding Criteria”.

In the table, below, we’ve got a column for the Criterion for Decision. This is the specific feature that the investors are counting as an indicatory of the company helping women, such as being women-owned or women-led.

The column Expected System Impact tries to answer three questions: What happens?Where does the wealth/ profit go? What does the wealth get used for? The idea here is that, if women are helped by companies, it’s because these companies generate new wealth. (Generally, that’s how businesses work.) How that wealth is deployed also influences the company’s impact.

The column Theory of Change is my preliminary/draft effort to answer the questions Why does this change women’s overall situation? What causes these improvements?.  Here I’m trying to make the causal chain explicit. How is one thing expected to influence the next, to create positive change?

It’s important to be clear that in any theory of change, you won’t always get the outcome you seek. For example, you can put Betsey DeVos in charge of education (a woman in power!) but you won’t get educational policies that benefit women, girls, and gender nonconforming people. But you have to be explicit about the steps so that when something isn’t working, you know where to change things.

Finally, I grouped these criteria according to their Implicit Equality Goal, the vision of ‘equality’ that they seem to be working towards.   “Parity” is simply the idea of spreading the same proportion of women across organizational levels, often with the assumption that the ratio of women to me should be 50/50. This is a basic goal of representation and fairness.   “Equity & Justice” goals are about making sure that (1) different groups get different resources according to what they need to flourish while we eliminate the biases that prevent them from participating in the system fully, and (2) about changing the system so that supports everyone as needed in a system that’s been changed so that no group is privileged over others and no group is oppressed/subordinated/dominated by another.

Levels of Change Potential Based on Funding Criteria

What does it mean to be “women-led’?

This is a great question, recently raised by Nancy Wilson, Founder & CEO, Canadian Women’s Chamber of Commerce.  Often the criterion of “women-led” gets operationalized by simply counting the number of women on the company’s executive team (EVP level and/or C-suite). But no consideration is given to the concern that one woman is not enough to show that the company is “women-led”, or the other critical consideration that not all leadership positions are created equal. We all know that the EVP of Human Resources or Marketing is rarely (never?) as powerful as the EVP of Product or Finance. There’s a hierarchy, and if a firm is women-led then women need to be at the highest points of this hierarchy.  

Wilson makes this intuition clear, writing:

Finally, if a fund is directed to support women in a particular industry, at least one of the women in a senior leadership role must be in a position directly related to that industry. In the case of technology, that requires a woman to be chief executive officer, chief technology officer or other tech or development role at the most senior level.

When a person holds a position where their expertise is indispensable to the company’s success at its core activity it’s more likely that this person will have organizational leadership.

These women leaders’ influence on the company’s direction can’t merely be inferred by her/their titles. It must be perceptible, constant, and long-term.   

What does it mean to be women owned? 

Wilson also offers important texture to this question, since with many star5tups and going enterprises the ownership structure can be complicated, with no one group or person owning enough of the company to direct it by near fiat as the Zuckerbergs and Bezos of this world  

Women-owned can mean that women owners of capital get a significant and perhaps majority of the return on investment (e.g., profits, wealth). It can also mean that women owners – regardless of their percent ownership – have a significant influence on the direction of the company.  What we’re looking for in this case is one or both of these situations. 

Even where there are formal criteria for assessing “women-owned’ and ‘women-led’ companies, it is possible for these criteria to be gamed.  Astute ‘gender lens investors’, philanthropists and government agencies should have their own due diligence procedures to make sure that the companies they invest in meet these women-first criteria in substance and not just on a check off list. What does it mean to be women-led? How many/ what proportion of women is expected to make a difference and be the tipping point of influence? 

Your thoughts? This table is my first step, so there are sure to be typos, errors, oversights, and ideas we should add. Please offer your suggestions in the comments or side notes and I’ll incorporate them into the next version of the table.

I’m hoping that decision makers at investment funds, government agencies, accelerators, and any other institution that’s hoping to support gender equality in entrepreneurship and business will find this table useful in helping them understand their own implicit theories and make clearer decisions about which “women led” companies they want to support, and why. 

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Apologies in advance for typos, etc. I’m trying to get ideas out, not to get them perfect. Onward!

What Defines a Feminist Business?

Currently, we don't have a way to define a business as feminist. This draft, below, is an excerpt from a longer chapter. I'm offering it here as a first step in the conversation about how to define a feminist business. We'll develop and polish this idea together. 

My graduate school professor who couldn’t even imagine the existence of a feminist profit-making business was not alone in this challenge.

Lots of people struggle to imagine what a feminist business would be like.  This despite the fact that feminists businesses are — and have been — all around us.  Businesses defining themselves as feminist have been around for at least half a century.  Emerging in the 1960s and 70s, feminist bookstores, food co-ops, homeschooling centers, auto body shops, doula networks, and more were trying to find ways of making money and supporting themselves by selling goods and services in the marketplace, while also promoting feminist values, while also creating a more feminist collective environment in which the members could work, grow, and feel safe.  Feminist businesses were the original social enterprise.

Despite their existence and success in real life, feminist businesses still seem implausible to many people. 

Even if you have a pretty good understanding of what it means to be a feminist and what feminists believe, it’s hard to imagine how these values would translate into businesses that would make a profit. That’s partly because feminism has often (always) been working against “business as usual”. Feminists understand that much of conventional business works only because companies are able to use sexism and racism to exploit marginalized people who have less power. 

When folks do imagine feminist businesses, they think of the crotchety pair at the helm of “Women and Women First”, the bookstore featured in the sketch comedy Portlandia. At “Women and Women First” the owners are so doctrinaire in their feminism and anti-capitalism that they can’t find a way to serve customers in a profitable and politically purposeful way.  Feminist business is unimaginable to them.

The challenge of imagining a feminist business isn’t helped by management scholarship. Very few studies focus on real-life feminist businesses and there's not much feminist theorizing where scholars aim to identify what would make a business “feminist”. 

Notably, Susan Koen’s 1984 research looked closely at four feminist business / service organizations— a bookstore, a restaurant, a health services center, and a magazine.  Her discussion of the features common to these workplaces yet different from conventional business offers real-world proof of how feminist businesses are distinctive.  Patricia Yancey Martin (1990) offered a theory-driven list of ten dimensions that would mark a business as feminist, helping to identify conceptual categories.  I used both of these works, as well as my own knowledge of the literature on organizational identity, to proposed the seven dimensions that follow. 

Seven Dimensions That Define a Feminist Business

The perfect aligned, fully-realized feminist business would have 7 key features:

1. Feminist Leaders and Members: Individuals in all roles within the company who are practicing feminism and actively learning about feminism.

2. Feminist Organization: Structure, processes, and culture that aim to reflect feminist values and support feminist practices (e.g., collaborative democratic decision making, flatter and more distributed authority, wellness & sustainability oriented, etc.) 

3. A Feminist Intent:  A collectively defined, shared, and explicit feminist ideology (aka theory of change) about how the organization is making a difference in the world.  This ideology would link the company’s identity and actions to each other.  

4. Feminist Ownership & Governance: A structure where ownership, stewardship, and direction are shared along feminist principles, where the owners/ stakeholders themselves practice feminism.  

5. A Feminist Product or Service:  Something made and offered by the business that helps to improve the situation of women, girls, and people in a feminist way; that challenges dynamics of oppression, that offers non-exploitative alternatives. Marketing that advocates feminism.

6. A Feminist Revenue Model:  A net-positive (i.e., non-extractive) plan for raising, deploying, generating, and distributing financial and non-financial value and impact (all company resources) so that all stakeholders gain fairly when as the company succeeds (e.g., employees as well as investors, customers as well as employees). Think of triple-bottom line companies, and Regenerative Businesses.

7.  Connection with the Feminist Community: Open interaction with other feminist groups and individuals, checking in for encouragement and support, being accountable to them, contributing whenever possible.

These seven dimensions cover the key elements (and of course not everything) that can distinguish one kind of organization from another. 

Knowing what to count and how to count it is challenging.  

I haven’t yet developed ways to assess a company’s feminism on these specific dimensions in more detail, in a way that would create a scale that measures what’s more and what’s less feminist. Just to measure conventional organizations, management scholars have a jungle of definitions and scales for each dimensions.    (There are several hundred different ways to measure organizational culture alone).

For all seven dimensions, we’re still figuring out the sub-elements that compose them and how they might be measured. 

(For perspective on the difficulty of this task, consider that B Labs have taken over 11 years to establish the definitions and measures of a B Corporations. They started in 2006 and are still evolving their criteria. ) 

Even more challenging is that we don’t have a single definition of what’s feminist — there are many feminisms. And, we don’t have any roadmap, ladder, or pyramid thing that shows levels of feminism advancing from basic to sophisticated, self-focused to global.

We don’t know yet, for example, how to measure something as simple as the level of an individual leader’s feminism. There actually (still) isn’t a well-established sociological questionnaire or psychological scale that helps us identify what beliefs are more or less feminist, or that establishes the sophistication of a person’s feminist understanding.  

That said, worrying about an accurate and precise measurement strategy takes us off on a tangent.  (That kind of measurement is an objectivist, patriarchal plot anyway.)

We care about defining feminist businesses not because we want to score and measure them, but because we want to understand where and how to grow as feminist organizations.   

I’m proposing these seven defining dimensions not so that we can “accurately” or “precisely” measure a company’s feminism along some scale that researchers and experts devise. The purpose of these dimensions is, instead, to help focus our efforts as we evaluate our companies and as we imagine what our companies could become.  

This exercise invites us to evaluate and reflect on the organizations we're building. The process can give companies a fuller sense of what they need to consider as they grow to be more feminist and have a stronger positive influence on the world.

These Seven Dimensions That Define a Feminist Business
offer us a framework for discussing and assessing a company. 

Take a look at this circle, below. Radiating from the center point is a line for each of six* dimensions that stretches to the circle’s perimeter.   The center point is “none” and the point on the perimeter is “a whole lot”.  

With a rough sense of where a company falls on each of the seven dimensions, using a scale from “not much” to “a whole lot”, we can see how big and widespread a company’s feminism is, or isn’t. 

Using two well-known menstrual products companies as my models, I’ve sketched out how I (roughly) assess how feminist each company is.

Company A is mapped out in pink. 

• The company’s leaders and co-owners identify themselves as feminists, and the members all espouse feminist values. On this first dimension, the company is “a whole lot” feminist.

• As an organization, Company A uses a co-leadership model among the top management team, and a team-based, self-directing model among the members as a whole. Company A is “somewhat” feminist in its organization.

• With regard to ownership and governance, it is mostly owned by the founders and two large investors, not the membership as a group. Still, it’s a B Corporation, committed to a triple bottom line. So, Company A is “quite” feminist on this dimension.

• Company A’s products are eco-friendly, body positive, and affordable. I think they’re “a whole lot” feminist.

• Its revenue model aims to distribute value to all stakeholders, including the local community. The company focuses on reducing waste and increasing sustainability (to be less extractive). It contributes its non-financial and financial resources to help others, so overall it seems “a whole lot” feminist.

• And, the intent of Company A is “a whole lot” feminist — its goal is to transform the way the world things about women’s bodies.

Given the amount of space covered by these dimensions, Company A looks “a whole lot” like a feminist business. 

Now consider Company B, another menstrual products business, mapped out in blue. 

• Company B’s leadership says its feminist, but doesn’t seem to act that way. Members support the feminist intent of the company, but we don’t know if they identify as feminists. Giving them the benefit of the doubt, Company B’s leadership and members are “somewhat” feminist.

• Organizationally, Company B is a hard-driving, fear ridden hierarchy. “Not very” feminist.

• Similarly, the company is owned and governed by the CEO and two corporate-y investors (I.e., not social entrepreneurs). “Not very” feminist.

• Company B’s products, however, are “a whole lot” feminist. Body positive, period positive, eco-friendly.

• With its revenue model, Company B seems to be trying to share value with partners/ suppliers, and to become more sustainable, so it’s “somewhat” feminist.

• And, Company B’s espoused purpose is to change how the world sees women, so its intent seems more than just “somewhat” feminist.

Looking at the graph of these dimensions, we can see that Company B is feminist in some ways. 

The graphs are useful for showing us a big picture of each business, and they’re especially useful in comparing one company to another.   Compared to Company A, Company B somewhat less feminist, especially on the ownership/governance and leadership dimensions.

[[ * I noticed after I started drawing the graphs that I’d missed the seventh dimension, the Connection with the Feminist Community. Although embarrassed at my lapse, I wasn’t really surprised that I forgot to graph this dimension — it's the most radical one, and the most feminist.   Also, very few for-profit organizations even think of themselves as responsible to, accountable to, and in relationship with a specific community.   I’ll hold this topic for a fuller discussion in a later post. (Also, I’ll need to find a circle graph with seven rays and not six.) ]]

How much does it take to be defined as a Feminist Business?

A company doesn’t have to reach some pre-defined threshold on all seven of these dimensions to be considered feminist. Any company that is working to become more feminist on these dimensions can call itself feminist (or be seen as feminist by others), with the understanding that feminism is more about practice and action than about meeting some outside researcher’s static criteria.  

 Of course, a company aiming to be feminist shouldn’t have any features that blatantly contradict feminist values and beliefs (e.g., the majority shareholder shouldn’t be Simon Legree, and the product should not be polluting the earth). 

How do these dimensions work for you, for defining a company’s feminism?

Some people may find these criteria surprising. They may want to focus on visible features, like the number and representation of women. They might define a feminist company as one where 51% of the company is owned by women, or where women as 51% of the top leadership team. 

(Of course, the idea that having many women means that the company is feminist is problematic. “Women” and “feminists” aren’t the same thing. Many women are not feminists. Many people who aren’t women are terrific feminists.) 

Folks might also want to require that a feminist company make products for women or girls.  But, I don’t want want to exclude companies that produce gender-neutral or universal products and services. There are too many companies that serve other focused populations that could, if so inspired, use their business to practice and promote feminism.  I think the definition of a feminist business is, and should be, more complex and more comprehensive that either of these two criteria.   

For now…

The invitation here is for any company to consider where it lands on these seven dimensions, and then grow from there. 

Having seven dimensions to the definition helps to offer more pathways for companies to grow more feminist. Companies owned by men or not-yet-feminists, companies with conventional shareholder owners, companies with traditional hierarchical management structures, companies that emphasize sustainability and not (yet) gender justice, companies still figuring out how to distribute profits more fairly, and especially companies who don’t yet see themselves as responsible or responsive to the feminist community can all find their place on these seven dimensions, and recognize where they have opportunities to grow. 

Let me know what you think!

August 19 draft

References

Koen, Susan. (1984) Feminist Workplaces: Alternative models for the Organization of Work. PhD dissertation, University of Michigan.

Martin, Patricia Yancey. (1990) Rethinking feminist organizations. Gender & Society 4:182-206.