International Feminist Journal of Politics

ISSN: 1461-6742 (Print) 1468-4470 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rfjp20

The Political Economy of Transnational Business

Feminism
Adrienne Roberts
To cite this article: Adrienne Roberts (2015) The Political Economy of Transnational
Business Feminism, International Feminist Journal of Politics, 17:2, 209-231, DOI:
10.1080/14616742.2013.849968
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14616742.2013.849968

Published online: 28 Jan 2014.

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The Political Economy of Transnational

Business Feminism

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PROBLEMATIZING THE CORPORATE-LED GENDER EQUALITY AGENDA

ADRIENNE ROBERTS
University of Manchester, UK

Abstract ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------This article traces the emergence of a politico-economic project of transnational

business feminism (TBF) over the past decade. This project which is being developed
by a coalition of states, financial institutions, the UN, corporations, NGOs and others
stresses the business case for gender equality by arguing that investments made in
women can (and should) be measured in terms of the cost savings to families and communities, as well as in terms of boosting corporate profitability and national competitiveness. This article uses a feminist historical materialist framework to argue that TBF
is facilitating the further entrenchment of the power of corporations to create expert
knowledges about both gender and development. Using the Nike-led Girl Effect
campaign as an example, it is argued that TBF is promoting a naturalized and essentialized view of women and gender relations that ignores the historical and structural
causes of poverty and gender-based inequality. It is also helping to reproduce the
same neoliberal macroeconomic framework that has created and sustained genderbased and other forms of oppression via the global feminization of labor, the erosion
of support for social reproduction and the splintering of feminist critiques of capitalism.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Keywords
transnational business feminism, feminist IPE, feminist historical materialism, the
business case for gender equality, World Bank, social reproduction, the Girl Effect

INTRODUCTION
Over the past decade, a growing coalition of capitalist states, regional and
international financial institutions (IFIs), inter-governmental institutions

International Feminist Journal of Politics, 2015

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(i.e. the UN) and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) has converged on

the need to promote gender equality for women globally. This coalition
finds its ideological basis in the business case for gender equality, which highlights the benefits to be accrued by women, communities, national economies
and private businesses by investing in women and girls. Such investment is not
only important in its own right, it is also smart economics (World Bank 2012;
for a critique see Roberts and Soederberg 2012). Transnational corporations
(TNCs) have also increasingly stressed the importance of investing in women
and girls for the double bottom line. Underpinned by a range of studies conducted by financial and accounting firms, the specific argument is that investing in women will expand the pool of talented workers and consumers, thereby
increasing corporate competitiveness and profitability. Given that women are
the worlds most underutilised resource (Goldman Sachs 2010: 3), investing
in women and girls just makes good business sense.
The purpose of this article is to critically interrogate what is at stake in this
conflation of the demands for gender equality with the business case and the
financial interests of corporations. Critical feminist scholars have long criticized the business case for gender equality for reconstructing women in the
Global South as victims in need of saving by (Western) feminists, OECD
countries and the IFIs. In so doing, it is argued, (neo)colonial relations of
power are reproduced and the voices of women from the Global South are marginalized.1 A second line of feminist critique draws on the governmentality literature in order to argue that it imbues women with a particular neoliberal
form of rationality, constructing them as rational economic women, whose
responsible behavior and individual choices will lift themselves and their
families out of poverty.2 This then imposes a model of behavior that ignores
the historically constructed structures, social relations and power dynamics
that condition individual behavior and perpetuate poverty and underdevelopment.
Yet, despite these critiques, the business case for gender equality continues
to hold ideological sway and seems to be growing in strength in the wake of
the most recent global financial crisis. This article argues that one explanation
for this, which has been underemphasized in the work noted above, is the
growing role that corporations have played in both supporting projects
grounded in the business case for gender, as well as in producing particular
business-oriented and market-based knowledges about women and gender
relations. The central argument is that corporations have helped to drive the
emergence of a politico-economic project of transnational business feminism (TBF) (Roberts 2012). Rooted in a feminist historical materialist perspective, it is argued that the discourses and practices of TBF have helped to
perpetuate understandings of women and gender that are ahistorical and apolitical and which help to obscure the growing power of corporations in shaping
gender relations within the broader context of neoliberal-led development.
The example of the emerging relation between the Nike-led Girl Effect campaign and the UKs Department for International Development (DFID) offers

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some clear indications of the problems associated with the instrumental use of
gender equality, which has become a deeply useful means of legitimizing and
depoliticizing the exercise of private power.
While it is important not to overemphasize the coherence of this project,
which is multifaceted, dynamic and at times contradictory, the following
section will map out some of the assemblages that constitute the TBF project
and identify some of its defining characteristics. The second section uses a
feminist historical materialist lens to theorize some of the ways in which
TBF obscures the gender and class power relations that constitute the capitalist
global political economy. It is argued that TBF helps to legitimize and reproduce the same neoliberal macroeconomic framework that has created and sustained gender-based inequality and oppression via first, the global
feminization of labor, second, the erosion of support for social reproduction
and third, the de-linking of feminist critiques from critiques of corporate-led
neoliberal capitalism. The third section focuses more specifically on one
assemblage, based around the Girl Effect campaign and DFID, which exemplifies the dangers of recasting feminist concerns for gender equality though the
lens of TBF.

DEFINING AND THEORIZING TRANSNATIONAL BUSINESS FEMINISM

In many respects, the extent to which TBF constitutes an emerging politicoeconomic project remains an open question in need of further empirical investigation. However, in what follows, I would like to suggest that there has been
an identifiable convergence of social forces around a particular understanding
of gender equality and that this has led to an emerging project with several
identifiable characteristics: (1) it is transnational in scope; (2) the ideological
underpinnings are in the instrumental and marketized logic of the business
case for gender equality; (3) corporations have played an important role in
defining its parameters; (4) it tends to pivot around the 2008 global financial
crisis; and (5) it is helping to link certain feminist ideas and interests to the
interests of global capitalism. Each of these dimensions will be considered in
turn.

A Transnational Project
The first characteristic of this project is that it is largely driven by transnational social forces. These include transnational corporations (particularly
large financial and accounting firms), inter-governmental institutions, international organizations (including the World Economic Forum), the IFIs and
some transnational NGOs. This is not to suggest, however, that the social
forces supporting the extension and deepening of TBF only operate at the
global scale. Rather, the project is multi-scalar as it is further linked to regional

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banks and organizations, as well as the governments of many OECD countries

(particularly via their international development departments). Academics and
universities are also deeply embedded in the construction of this framework,
especially through their business schools and political science departments.
For example, Goldman Sachs corporate philanthropy initiative 10,000
Women is linked to over fifty academic institutions, including many of the
Ivy League universities and leading business schools associated with Columbia, Harvard, Stanford, Oxford, Cambridge and Yale (Goldman Sachs 2008).

The Business Case for Gender Equality

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Second, the ideological moorings of TBF are in the business case for gender
equality. As a number of critics have noted, this perspective can be traced
back to the efficiency approach to women in development (WID) that was
popularized in the 1980s and 1990s. Coinciding with the adoption by the
World Bank and other institutions of the so-called Washington Consensus, the
argument here was that since women constituted more than 50 percent of the
worlds population, development efforts should seek to integrate them into the
paid labor force, which would lead to more efficient growth and, consequently,
reduce gender inequalities (Chowdhry 1995). In framing the argument as such,
this approach, as well as its later articulations via the business case for gender,
tends to emphasize empowerment in terms of the right to participate in the
market economy as producers and consumers of goods and services (Eisenstein
2009). Within this framework, the market is emptied of power relations and there
is an erasure of the historical and structural conditions that have created and sustained inequalities between countries and between groups of people over time.3
Where gender equality and womens empowerment are linked to improved
access to education and health services and forms of political inclusion, the
benefits are frequently presented in instrumentalist terms. That is, they are
viewed as investments whose benefits can be measured in terms of the cost
savings to families and communities, as well as in terms of boosting corporate
profitability and national competitiveness. As Naila Kabeer has extensively
documented in her work, while womens empowerment has tended to be
framed in relation to education, employment and political leadership, forms
of civic participation and collective forms of empowerment have received
much less attention (Kabeer 2003, 2011).
To offer a recent example, in its 2012 World Development Report (WDR) on
Gender Equality and Development, the World Bank argues that while gender
equality is important for both intrinsic and instrumental reasons, it tends to
focus on the latter, basing the report on the economics of gender equality and
development (2012, 6, emphasis in original; see Roberts and Soederberg
2012). In contrast to much critical feminist scholarship that has used a gender
lens to critique the underlying andocentric assumptions of economics4 and to
challenge the framing of women as the new archetypal neoliberal subjects of

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development (Benera 1999; Elias 2013), the Banks business-oriented approach

to gender uses economic theory to understand what drives differences in key
aspects of welfare between men and women (World Bank 2012, 6). These
include differences in access to education and health, access to economic opportunities and productive resources and the ability to make effective choices and
take action (2012, 6). According to the report, addressing these inequalities is
smart economics and is instrumental to development because it can enhance
economic efficiency and improve other development outcomes (2012, 3).
As a second example, the business case is also well captured in the Womens
Empowerment Principles (WEPs). The WEPs were developed in 2009 by the
United Nations Development Fund for Women (now part of UN Women) in collaboration with the UN Global Compact (a voluntary corporate monitoring
initiative), as a means of guiding businesses on how to empower women in
the workplace, marketplace and community. Sub-titled Equality Means
Business, the principles are not just for businesses, but are intended to
inform other stakeholders, including governments, in their engagement
with business.5 The principles are: (1) establish high-level corporate leadership for gender equality; (2) treat all women and men fairly at work
respect and support human rights non-discrimination; (3) ensure the health,
safety and well-being of all women and men workers; (4) promote education,
training and professional development for women; (5) implement enterprise
development, supply chain and marketing practices that empower women;
(6) promote equality through community initiatives and advocacy; and (7)
measure and publicly report on progress to achieve gender equality.
While these principles may indeed be important for improving the lives of
women, they also help to normalize and naturalize the broader fusing of
gender equality to participation in the capitalist market economy. At the
same time, they are helping to legitimize the growing importance of corporations in promoting sustainable development through gender equality.
That is, the WEPs fuse gender equality to corporate-led sustainable development by elaborating the gender dimension of good corporate citizenship, the
UN Global Compact and business role in sustainable development.6
The WEPs use an instrumentalist reasoning in framing womens empowerment as good for both business and national economies, but also, perhaps
more problematically, in emphasizing the monetary costs of gender oppression
and inequality. It is argued, for instance, that the cost of intimate partner violence in the United States alone exceeds US$5.8 billion per year in health care
expenses and productivity losses. In Canada violence against women costs
around $1.17 billion per year and in the UK the indirect costs of domestic violence amount to around 23 billion per year or 440 per person. In Asia the
gender equality gap in employment costs $47 billion annually (UN Global
Compact and UN Women 2011, 10). In framing the problematic in this way,
the business case helps to perpetuate a market-based view of gender inequality
that is rooted in capitalist conceptions of value and which attempts to quantify
complex historical and thoroughly power-ridden relations. The point is not

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that there is a need to oppose all forms of quantification per se, but rather to
emphasize the socio-political implications of adopting the market-oriented
view of gender that has been developed, in large part, by businesses that
have profitability as a bottom line.
Indeed, both the WDR and the WEPs draw on research by private sector
banks and accounting firms that has sought to devise ways of assessing the
gender dividends to be gained from investing in women (e.g. UN Global
Compact and UN Women 2011, 10; World Bank 2012, 342). They also draw
on research by the World Economic Forum (WEF), which is a private
business-led international organization that has been an important force in
fusing gender equality to improved national economic performance. In its
Global Gender Gap Reports, the WEF claims to have found a strong correlation between a countrys gender gap and its national competitiveness.7 As
Juanita Elias (2013) documents, the strong commitment to the business case
has had the effect of linking aggregate measures of gender equality to measurable levels of economic competitiveness, thereby creating an incentive to
prioritize benchmarking and indexing. The risk in the approach taken by the
WEF and others is that as gender equality is equated with value for
money, value for money will be equated with numbers and indexes while
the value of broader-based and less easily quantifiable social transformation
will be marginalized (Eyben 2011).

The Role of Business

As the preceding discussion suggests, corporations (in conjunction with the
business press, some business management literature and mainstream economists) have been central to creating and reproducing the economic logic
that underpins TBF. Within this epistemological framework, women tend
to be understood as an undifferentiated group of people who face a number
of barriers to full participation in markets and society. However, rather than
ignoring gender and subsuming women under the ontological category of
rational economic man as has been characteristic of much neoclassical economics (Ferber and Nelson 2003), there is a growing tendency to view women as
more risk adverse than men and to have longer-term goals. As has been well
documented, this view has helped to fuel investment in microfinance institutions (both non- and for-profit) that specifically target women as less
risky borrowers who are more likely than men to spend their earnings on
their families.8
For many of the global financial and accounting firms, womens relative
aversion to risk has also been framed as an important asset that will help to
rein in the sorts of excessively risky behaviors that threaten profitability. As
Claire Shipman and Katty Kay point out in their book Womenomics (2010)
which is partly a guide to how corporations can improve performance and
profitability by giving women more flexibility in the workplace and partly a

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self-help guide for women seeking such flexibility [a] whole host of business
brains, from Michigan to Norway, have uncovered an asset-to-estrogen ratio
that links greater numbers of female employees to greater profits (2010, 1).
Within the economics literature, one reason for this comes down to pure
biology, as studies have found that heightened levels of testosterone may lead
to more risky behavior (Beckmann and Menkhoff 2008; Coates 2012). Rooted
in a positivist methodology that seeks to look empirically at the effect of sex
on risk-taking, this work leaves little room for considering the extent to
which social constructions of masculinity and femininity and pressures to
adhere to gender norms are rooted in hierarchies of power (Nelson 2012, 24).
A second explanation, which features more prominently in the corporate
and business management literature, is rooted in an economic theory called
Diversity Prediction Theorem. Simply stated, this theory is based on the idea
that a more diverse crowd is more likely to generate diverse responses and
therefore achieve optimal outcomes (i.e. profits). As with the former explanations, this work also essentializes women and depoliticizes gender inequality by failing to account for the social power relations that reproduce
inequalities. At the same time, gender equality is wedded to a corporate
growth strategy. In their women-centered research, Groundbreakers, Ernst &
Young (2010) point to the importance of diversity as a competitive strategy
and approvingly quote a professor from the University of Michigan: Its not
about morality or fairness or doing the right thing; its not even about
hiring smart people. Instead, its about honing a competitive weapon. Diversity
is a strategy (2010, 9). McKinsey and Company (2007, 2010) make a similar
argument in their Women Matter series, which has been conducting research
about gender diversity in management and corporate performance since 2007.
Goldman Sachs line of womenomics research (2005, 2010) has also been
influential (Roberts and Soederberg 2012). Differing somewhat from the management-oriented womenomics of Shipman and Kay, Goldmans research is its
newest secular investment theme, aimed at assessing the economic dividends
to be gained from higher female employment and womens rising purchasing
power. The womenomics theme was later picked up by The Economist magazine,
which emphasized the enormous potential of women as a vast untapped market.9

The Crisis as Conjuncture

A fourth characteristic of TBF is that it tends to pivot around the 2008 global
financial crisis. As this argument has been developed more fully elsewhere,10 a
few examples should suffice to make the point:
.

World Bank President Robert Zoellick argued that the financial crisis has
made the business case for gender equality even more pressing, particularly
for women in the poorest countries: At this time of economic turmoil,
investing in women is critical and a host of studies suggest that putting

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earning in womens hands is the intelligent thing to do to aid recovery and

long-term development.11
According to Klaus Schwab, the founder and Executive Chairman of the
WEF, [g]reater representation of women in senior leadership positions
within governments and financial institutions is vital not only to find solutions to the current economic turmoil, but to stave off such crises in the
future (quoted in Ernst & Young 2010, 2).
In 2012, Executive Director of UN Women, Michelle Bachelet, argued that:

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We simply can no longer afford to deny the full potential of one half of the population. The world needs to tap into the talent and wisdom of women. Whether the
issue is food security, economic recovery, health, or peace and security, the participation of women is needed now more than ever.

She went on to argue that [u]nleashing womens economic potential will

make economic growth and recovery faster and more equitable.12
Building on arguments made in their womenomics book, Shipman and Kay
began an article in the Washington Post by noting that [w]hile the pinstripe
crowd fixates on troubled assets, a stalled stimulus and mortgage remedies, it
turns out that a more sure-fire financial fix is within our grasp and has been
for years. The fix, it turns out, is a healthy dose of estrogen.

The crisis is a pivotal moment for a number of reasons. For one, the crisis
threatened to undermine the legitimacy of global finance-led capitalism,
creating an incentive for the capitalist classes to emphasize the philanthropic
and socially responsible behavior of corporations, particularly the banks,
financial and accounting firms that faced some of the harshest criticism
(Prugl 2012; Roberts and Soederberg 2012; Elias 2013). A second and
related trend that has favored the (re)emergence of the business case for
gender equality is the development by the news media, governments, academics and others of highly gendered narratives that root the crisis in the
unethical and/or corrupt behavior of masculinized individuals (for overviews,
see McDowell 2010; Prugl 2012). Within this framework, women emerge as the
cure to the testosterone-fueled risk-taking behaviors that helped to bring
about the crisis. Third, the framing of investment in women and girls as the
most efficient use of resources to combat global poverty may have a particularly strong appeal at the current conjuncture as many governments in the
Global North and South have committed themselves to a politics of austerity.

Is This Project Feminist?

The labeling of this project as feminist may be somewhat controversial, particularly to those who tend to equate feminism with more critical epistemological positions and transformative political projects that seeks to challenge

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dominant global power relations. Indeed, critical feminists have extensively

argued against the sorts of positivist methodologies that have been used to
link women, as an essentialized and undifferentiated category, to profitability (Tickner 2005; Ackerly and True 2010). Much critical feminist research is
also characterized by an acute awareness of the power relations that are
involved in the production of knowledge and have stressed the necessity of
engaging with epistemology itself as an important method for research
(Bakker and Gill 2003; Ackerly and True 2010). As will be outlined below, a
critical feminist perspective does indeed provide the tools for developing a
deep ontological and epistemological critique of TBF.
However, as decades of scholarship by queer feminists, feminist of color,
Third World feminists and others have made apparent, there is no singular
feminism, but rather multiple feminisms. And, while some of the most
thoroughly market-oriented lines of research are framed as women-centered
rather than feminist per se, other writings are more explicitly linked to a particular western version of liberal feminism that frames empowerment in terms
of the right to participate in the market economy. For example, Goldman
Sachs womenomics research claims to be women-centered, while
Shipman and Kay explain in Womenomics that they are indeed feminists,
albeit (liberal) feminists of a modern variety, who do not necessarily share
the concerns of earlier generations (2010, 67). The important question
driving this research is not whether or not TBF is genuinely feminist, but
rather the reasons for and the extent to which struggles against gendered
forms of inequality and oppression have been incorporated into a politicoeconomic project that supports the reproduction of neoliberal capitalist frameworks of accumulation, which are inherently inequitable and exploitative.
Indeed, the extensiveness of this project suggests that the ability of critical
feminist scholars to adequately disturb the ontological, epistemological and
methodological underpinnings of mainstream scholarship and policy development has been somewhat limited. Rather, the project is more commensurate
with the ontological and epistemological positions of those forms of liberal
feminism that have articulated a view of womens rights and empowerment
without challenging the broader neoliberal macroeconomic framework that
has created and sustained gender-based inequality and oppression, that is,
via the global feminization of labor, the erosion of public supports for social
reproduction and the protection of the rights of capital above and beyond
those of the global poor. As Nancy Fraser (2009) and Hester Eisenstein
(2009) have pointed out, whereas many feminist struggles in the 1970s and
1980s tended to focus on the interconnected forms of economic, cultural
and political injustice that were believed to be rooted in patriarchal capitalism,
in ensuing decades these struggles have increasingly been separated from each
other as well as from broader critiques of capitalism. The splintering of the
feminist critique created the space for the selective incorporation and
partial recuperation of some of its strands, which has helped to legitimize a

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version of capitalist society that runs directly counter to feminist visions of a

just society (Fraser 2009, 99).

TOWARD A CRITICAL FEMINIST APPROACH TO TBF

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In contrast to the ahistorical and depoliticized framing of gender inequality by

TBF, a critical feminist historical materialist perspective draws attention to the
ways in which the market is constituted by power relations between capital
and labor as well as between men and women and along other lines.
Further, any political strategy for gender equality must take into account
the gendered organization of reproductive work and the ways in which neoliberalism has intensified womens responsibility for social reproduction globally. From a critical feminist perspective, insofar as it is important to
centralize the many ways in which women and girls are disadvantaged, such
recognition needs to be rooted in an understanding of gender inequality as
conditioned by structural inequality, not just between men and women, but
also by class inequality, by the inequality between capital and labor and by
the inequalities conditioned by an unequal international state system.

Gendered Labor Markets and the Global Feminization of Labor

The starting point of the feminist historical materialist approach outlined here
lies in Marxs critique of capitalism as an historically specific form of social
organization that is based on the exploitation of a class of workers by a dominant class. Whereas liberal political economy offers an ahistorical and depoliticized account of capitalism that assumes the formal separation of the
political and the economic spheres, Marx sought to elucidate the artificial
nature of this separation (Marx [1867] 1976). Rather than viewing the
market as a formally separate economic sphere where abstract individuals
meet on equal terms to exchange commodities, including the commodity of
labor-power, it is argued that capitalism transferred many of the powers that
were formerly understood to be political powers (such as the power to appropriate the goods and services of the lower classes) to the economic sphere and
concealed their operation. Thus, under capitalism, many forms of exploitation
and oppression occur through the structural relations of the market itself,
though more directly coercive forms of power continue to operate alongside
this structural economic power (LeBaron and Roberts 2010, 2012).
From a feminist historical materialist perspective, the integration of women
from various countries and socio-economic backgrounds into labor markets
does not necessarily translate into their empowerment. For instance, it is
rather paradoxical that insofar as gender inequalities have been eroded in
labor markets, this has largely happened because diverse forms of insecurity
were driving greater numbers of women to enter the labor force at precisely

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the same time as labor markets were themselves becoming increasingly precarious. The growing precariousness of labor markets was conditioned by
macroeconomic changes associated with neoliberalism, including: the
growth of international trade in goods and services as a portion of national
incomes and foreign or MNC investment as a share of total investment; the
liberalization and concentration of trade and investment in those countries
with the lowest labor costs; growing competition among firms to reduce the
cost of labor (i.e. wages) rather than to improve levels of productivity; structural adjustment and other neoliberal economic policies that have liberalized
labor markets and led to the erosion of labor legislation; the undermining of
unions and the erosion of employment security; the erosion of the legitimacy of welfare systems and the privatization of social security (Standing
1999).
Guy Standing (1999) referred to this convergence of men and women at the
lower rungs of the labor market as the feminization of labour. The key point
is that insofar as entry into the paid labor force may improve gender equality,
for many workers, pay and working conditions have become increasingly poor
and rendered the social reproduction of themselves, their families and their
communities more and more difficult. International Labour Organisation
(ILO 2010) findings indeed confirm the on-going global feminization of
labor. Between 1980 and 2008, womens labor force participation rate rose
from 50.2 to 51.7 percent, at the same time as that of men fell from 82.0 to
77.7 percent. Labor markets continue to be segregated along gender lines,
with women concentrated in sectors characterized by low pay, long hours
and informal work arrangements. They are also overrepresented among
part-time workers, although the rate of men employed in part-time arrangements is also increasing in many countries (ILO 2010, 5).

The Feminization of Policy

While there are a large number of women, particularly in the least developed
countries, who remain outside of the formal labor force due to social and economic barriers to entry, these women continue to be heavily engaged in household work that is classified as non-economic activity (ILO 2010, 4). As
feminist historical materialists have argued for decades, the roots of gender
inequality are not found in womens exclusion from production per se, but
rather in the material and ideological separation of production from social
reproduction, in the sexual division of labor that this separation helps to solidify and in the devaluation of the work of social reproduction that is primarily
done by women.13
The on-going devaluation of gendered reproductive work is evidenced by
the fact that the social forces associated with TBF have argued for the need
to empower women in their roles as producers and consumers at the same
time as state support for social reproduction has been scaled back and/or

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attached to work requirements and conditionalities that are highly gendered,

often as the result of fiscal constraints posed by economic crises. In Latin
America, for instance, many countries introduced workfare programs in the
wake of the financial and economic crises in the 1980s and 1990s. These programs compelled those needing social assistance to work at wages that were
below the market average, typically about half of the mean wage rate
(United Nations 2010, 43). In more recent years, many of these programs
have been replaced by cash transfer programs that are used to support particular development objectives, including greater levels of school attendance by
children and improved use of health services, especially by women and children. As critics have pointed out, such targeted, individualized forms of
social provisioning stigmatize the programs, reproduce and deepen divisions
among the population and impose new responsibilities and forms of discipline
on women who must participate in health workshops, attend regular health
checks and ensure their childrens attendance at school (Molyneux 2006;
United Nations 2010).
Conditional cash transfers and other programs that increase the burden
placed on poor women and girls by increasing their responsibilities to their
families ultimately amount to what Ananya Roy has called the feminisation
of policy. This term is meant to refer to the ways in which development operates through women-oriented policies that in turn serve to maintain traditional
gender roles of social reproduction and create a third shift of voluntary, unpaid
labour for women (Roy 2010, 70; see also Chant 2006). As recent studies have
shown, women in poor households are facing an ever-expanding portfolio of
maternal obligations at the same time as they are entering into the labor force
in greater and greater numbers (Chant and Brickell 2010, cited in Roy 2010).
Thus, whereas TBF presents a depoliticized and ahistorical narrative, which
assumes that putting earnings in womens hands is the intelligent thing to
do, critical feminists have pointed to the complexities of linking gender to
poverty alleviation and caution that instrumentalist accounts of gender
inequality that centralize the individual agency of poor women as the main
drivers of development may help to further individualize the costs of social
reproduction and the naturalization of womens roles therein.

Macroeconomics
A third problem with TBF is that it helps to reproduce many of the same neoliberal macroeconomic conditions that have created a highly unequal global
economic system that has rendered social reproduction increasingly insecure.
For instance, in the 2012 WDR, the World Bank advances an argument for
gender equality through market participation (albeit with some state-based
social provisioning), while remaining almost entirely silent regarding the neoliberal macroeconomic policies that have rendered labor markets increasingly
precarious and constrained the ability of governments to finance public and

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redistributive forms of social provisioning (Razavi 2011; Roberts and Soederberg 2012). Rather, the WDR promotes gender equality at the macroeconomic
level through policies designed to remove constraints to market participation,
such as greater trade openness and the diffusion of new information and technology (World Bank 2012, 254).
Consistent with its broader mandate, the European Bank for Reconstruction
and Developments (EBRD) Gender Action Plan claims to go beyond economic
arguments to address issues related to transition to a market-oriented
economy. The EBRD argues that not only is economic empowerment beneficial
to women, men, children and society as a whole, but gender equality actually
leads to market expansion through the creation of products and services that
appeal to women consumers [and] the strengthening of market-based institutions and policies designed to improve labour conditions, favour social
inclusion and reduce discriminatory practices (EBRD 2009, 11). It is further
argued that gender equality will promote better corporate governance by reducing corruption (2009, 11). Here, gender equality becomes both the cause and
the consequence of the greater liberalization of economies while also being
framed as a substitute for the public regulation of corporations.
There is also little to no discussion within the TBF literature about the possible contradiction between the claims made by Goldman Sachs and others that
gender equality should be promoted as a macroeconomic policy and the
commitment to a neoliberal macroeconomic policy based on deregulated
financial markets and free trade (Goldman Sachs 2009). Such discourses and
the policies that they underpin help to legitimize corporate-led neoliberal
capitalism by emphasizing the ability of the market and the private sector to
improve social outcomes independent of government regulation. Within this
framework an apolitical gender equality agenda emerges that is separate
from critical feminist analyses of the ways in which capital and corporations
are deepening their power and influence over the lives and livelihoods of
men and women globally.14 The following section further develops a critical
feminist analysis of TBF by focusing more specifically on the assemblage of
social forces that has converged around Nikes Girl Effect campaign,
which has helped to further entrench instrumentalist understandings of
gender equality and a corporate-led development paradigm.

THE GIRL EFFECT AS AN EXAMPLE OF TRANSNATIONAL BUSINESS

FEMINISM
The Girl Effect is largely the brainchild of the Nike Foundation, which, after
reshaping its vision to focus on the alleviation of global poverty in 2004, found
that investment in girls allowed for the greatest impact. It found that investing
in adolescent girls was the best means of effecting positive change since when
a girl gains educational and economic opportunities, the benefits ripple beyond
her to her brothers, her sisters, her parents, her community, her future children

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and grandchildren (Nike 2009, 144). This perspective was later termed the Girl
Effect and the Nike Foundation has invested exclusively in girls ever since.
In 2008, Nike teamed up with the NoVo Foundation a private charitable
foundation that is run by Peter and Jennifer Buffett and whose global operations are largely financed through a $1 billion donation by Peters father,
the notorious investor Warren Buffett to launch girleffect.org as a communications platform. The message underlying the Girl Effect is simple: invest in a
girl and she will do the rest. In one of its videos,15 a picture is painted of the
world as a mess, replete with poverty, HIV and war. Perpetuating a stereotypical image of girls from the Global South in need of saving, the video asks the
(presumably western) viewer to imagine a girl living in poverty, with the words
flies, husband, baby, HIV and hunger appearing on the screen to help
set the scene. The solution to this mess is not science, the Internet, the government or money . . . its a girl. Naturalizing womens caring nature and their
roles in social reproduction, the video follows the logic outlined above that
investing in girls will not only empower them, but will ultimately lead to a
stronger economy and a better world.
In addition to promoting a naturalized and essentialized view of poor
women in need of saving by westerners, the Girl Effect naturalizes and depoliticizes the growing power of Nike and other corporations to define what constitutes development and poverty alleviation. Here, development can
apparently be achieved without debt forgiveness, the active participation of
the state in supporting progressive forms of social reproduction or a more
equitable global international political economy. The long-standing failure
of OECD countries to meet their commitments to provide official development
assistance (ODA) to the underdeveloped world also disappears from view.16
Yet, this simplified solution to poverty has been extremely influential, as is
evidenced by the numerous partnerships (and resources) that revolve around
Nike and the Girl Effect.

The Girl Effect as Smart Economics

In 2005, Nike and the UN co-founded the Coalition for Adolescent Girls, which
aims to bring together organizations that design, implement and evaluate
programs that benefit girls throughout the developing world who are
trapped in cycles of poverty.17 The leading report published by the Coalition,
Girls Count (Levine et al. 2009), uses the Girl Effect framework in order to
argue that economic and social gains can be achieved through: (1) counting
girls; (2) investing in programs focused on adolescent girls; and (3) giving
girls a fair share (of jobs, social programs, human rights, etc.) The Coalition
report is broadly informed by the business case for gender equality and it is
argued, for instance, that girls welfare is important for broader development
outcomes since they will constitute a large proportion of the future labor
force, making it a good investment. However, the report also diverges from

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the more strictly market-oriented approaches (e.g. World Bank 2006) in several
notable respects. For example, while it does acknowledge the role of corporations in promoting the Girl Effect, given that the agricultural and informal
sectors dominate economic activities in poor countries, the role of the state
and the international donor community is in the foreground of the Coalition
report while the responsibility of corporations in promoting gender equality
throughout their supply chains is given secondary importance.
However, Nike has clearly latched on to the smart economics discourse of
the World Bank and others emphasizing instrumentalist arguments for gender
equality. On its website, for instance, Nike argues that the billions of dollars
lost to gender discrimination in employment and teen pregnancy isnt a
social issue. Its smart economics.18
In 2007, Nike was the leading corporation involved in launching the Gender
Action Plan (GAP), which was launched along with the World Bank and the
governments of Australia, Canada, Denmark, Germany, Iceland, Norway,
Spain, Sweden, Italy and the UK. The goal of the GAP, entitled Gender Equality
as Smart Economics, is to support gender equality and womens empowerment, primarily by increasing womens access to jobs, land rights, financial
services, agricultural inputs and infrastructure.19 In order to do so, among
other things, the GAP advocates the mainstreaming of gender in World
Bank operations and the creation of global partnerships for womens economic
empowerment with governments, multilateral organizations, civil society and
private corporations. While the gender agenda outlined in the GAP is not new,
the project is uniquely designed to support the World Banks privatization
agenda by outlining a new role for the Banks private financing division, the
IFC, in promoting gender responsiveness in the private sector. The IFC is
also expected to increase the number of women participating in and benefiting
from development projects led by private sector (Zuckerman 2007). The Girl
Effect was also a focus of the 2009 World Economic Forum (WEF). As noted
above, the WEF is a private organization that has long been interested in promoting the role of business in development and in recent years, has centralized
the importance of women in national economic recovery, particularly in the
so-called emerging market economies (Elias 2013).

The Girl Effect as a Substitute for Development? The Example of the

Girl Hub
The Girl Effect has also played a role in shaping the ways in which certain OECD
governments conceptualize and fund development programs. Its role in helping
to reshape the priorities of the UK Department for International Development
(DFID) is an instructive example in this regard. In 2010, DFID teamed up with
the Nike Foundation to launch the Girl Hub. Funded by a three-year, 11.6
million grant from DFID, the Girl Hubs job is to unleash the Girl Effect by

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financing projects for adolescent girls in a number of developing countries and

by linking policy-makers in the developing world with donors.
The Girl Hub claims to be smoothing the path for the revolution, though it is
not entirely clear what this revolution will entail.20 Indeed, this was the conclusion of a recent report released by the Independent Commission for Aid
Impact (ICAI, an independent watchdog), which criticized the initiative for
lacking clarity about how it will achieve its goals and measure impact,
having poor accountability, financial management and planning and various
other shortcomings (ICAI 2012). Around the same time, the Gender & Development Network released an even more critical report that looked at the Girl Hub in
relation to DFIDs longer standing approach to gender equality.21 Whereas
DFIDs first gender policy document, Poverty Elimination and the Empowerment
of Women, went beyond supporting gender equality as a means of poverty
reduction, the Coalition government that has been in power since 2010 has
adopted a much more instrumentalist approach to gender equality and has centralized the importance of the participation of the private sector in achieving
gender equality (Gender & Development Network 2012).
DFIDs Business Plan for 2012 15 includes the following priorities:
1. Honor international commitments
2. Drive transparency, value for money and open government
3. Boost wealth creation
4. Strengthen governance and security in fragile and conflict-affected countries
and make UK humanitarian response more effective
5. Lead international action to improve the lives of girls and women
6. Combat climate change

In order to meet the fifth priority, DFIDs action plan includes the following:
5.1 Lead international action to empower girls and women
i. Work in partnership with the Nike Foundation to bring private sector expertise
into DFIDs strategy on gender equality and stimulate innovative approaches to
empowering adolescent girls;
ii. Implement programs to deliver the Strategic Vision for Girls and Women;
iii. Assess the progress of international organizations on delivering for girls and
women [ . . . ];
iv. Launch the Girls Education Challenge, available to the charitable and private
sectors, to put up to one million more of the worlds poorest girls in school by
2015;
v. Establish a research and innovation fund to build the evidence and test out new
approaches in ten priority countries on the most effective ways of preventing
violence against girls and women.
5.2 Lead international action to improve maternal health and access to family
planning [ . . . ] (DFID 2012, 12)

Within this new framework, the role of Nike and other corporations creating
expert knowledge about gender and in helping to shape the broader contours
of DFIDs approach to development is depoliticized. At the same time, DFID has

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developed an instrumentalist approach to gender equality that emphasizes

results-based actions and all but entirely ignores the structural causes of
poverty and gender inequality (Eyben 2011; Gender & Development
Network 2012).
Building on this broader framework, in its latest gender strategy paper, A New
Strategic Vision for Girls and Women, DFID identifies four priority areas: (1)
delay first pregnancy and support safe childbirth; (2) get economic assets directly
to girls and women; (3) get girls through secondary school; (4) prevent violence
against girls and women. While it does note that there is a need to create an
enabling environment to achieve these priorities, this is described as challenging discrimination, building effective legal frameworks to protect rights,
increasing the value given to girls and women by society (including men and
boys), helping women to make more informed choices, enabling their participation in politics and sustaining political commitments to services that benefit
them (DFID 2011, 5). The structural barriers that prevent girls from going to
school or limit their control of resources are not acknowledged. Neither are the
broader macroeconomic conditions that have reproduced underdevelopment
and poverty for men and women, girls and boys alike.
Drawing on the Nike Foundations expertise in gender equality, DFIDs work
through the Girl Hub has faced problems reconciling the simplified message that
you can invest in a girl and she will do the rest and the reality that girls
poverty is a complex social problem (ICAI 2012, 5). As the Gender & Research
Network report points out, collective action, particularly through womens
movements, is also marginalized in DFIDs work through the Girl Hub (Gender
& Development Network 2012, 5). The centralization of the Girl Effect framework therefore reproduces the status quo by failing to challenge broader neoliberal macroeconomic frameworks of power and accumulation. At the same time,
it depoliticizes and legitimizes the role of the private sector in shaping the contours of so-called development and poverty alleviation, which is framed in terms
of the investment by western individuals and corporations in girls from the
Global South who are in need of saving.

CONCLUSION
This article has drawn attention to a wide range of corporations, institutions,
states and academics that have converged on what appears to be an emerging
politico-economic project of transnational business feminism. Rather than
seeking to paint a coherent picture of a well-defined, clearly articulated and
executed politico-economic project, it has sought to highlight some of the
various assemblages that have emerged in recent years around a particular
market-oriented approach to gender inequality. While the renewed attention
given to gender inequality has the potential to be transformative, the ways
in which this has been articulated, namely through the business case for
gender equality and the fusing of public and private interests, fails to

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address many of the core concerns raised by decades of critical feminist scholarship. Rather, the wedding of gender equality and corporate profitability fails
to challenge the broader neoliberal macroeconomic frameworks that have
created and sustained gender-based inequality while perpetuating essentialized understandings of women and girls and naturalizing the role of corporations creating knowledges about women and gender as well as what
constitutes development and poverty-alleviation. The result has been simplified and instrumentalist solutions to complex social problems that are
rooted in overlapping structural inequalities, including those between men
and women, amongst social classes and between countries. Given the deepening influence of this project, there is a need for a renewed commitment to critical anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist feminist scholarship that disturbs this
attempt to reduce gender equality to a simple, measurable and profitable
goal that can be achieved while failing to challenge corporate power and neoliberal capitalism.
Adrienne Roberts
Politics
The University of Manchester
Arthur Lewis Building 4.008
Manchester, M13 9PL, UK
Email: adrienne.roberts@manchester.ac.uk

Notes
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14

226

See Spivak (1988); Chowdhry (1995); Chowdhry and Nair (2002); Bergeron (2003).
See Benera (1999); Rankin (2001); Griffin (2009).
See Soederberg (2005, 2010); Eisenstein (2009); Fraser (2009); Roy (2010).
See Elson and Cagatay (2000); Marchand and Runyan (2000); Ferber and Nelson
(2003); Peterson (2003); Young, Bakker, and Elson (2011).
http://www.unglobalcompact.org/Issues/human_rights/equality_means_
business/meetings_and_events
http://www.unglobalcompact.org/Issues/human_rights/equality_means_
business/meetings_and_events
http://www.weforum.org/issues/global-gender-gap (accessed 5 December 2011).
Rankin (2001); Bergeron (2003); Roy (2010); Taylor (2011).
A Guide to Womenomics. The Economist, 12 April 2006.
McDowell (2010); Roberts and Soederberg (2012); Prugl (2012); Roberts (2012);
Elias (2013).
World Bank Group Private Sector Leaders Forum Announces New Measures to
Improve Womens Economic Opportunities. Press release no: 2010/084/PREM.
http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsID=41120&Cr=un+women&Cr1=
Dalla Costa and James (1972); Bakker (2003); Federici (2004); LeBaron (2010).
Bakker (2003); Eisenstein (2009); Soederberg (2010); Gill and Roberts (2011).

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15
16

17
18
19

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20

21

Available at http://www.girleffect.org/why-girls/
For instance, in 2009 net ODA from OECD countries to the Least Developed
Countries (LDCs) stood at around 0.31 percent of GNI, which amounts to less
than half of the promised 0.7 percent (LDC Watch 2011).
http://www.coalitionforadolescentgirls.org/about
http://nikeinc.com/pages/the-girl-effect (emphasis added).
http://web.worldbank.org/WBSITE/EXTERNAL/TOPICS/EXTGENDER/0,,content
MDK:21983335pagePK:210058piPK:210062theSitePK:336868,00.html
Since this article was first drafted, the Girl Hub has replaced the claim that its
central mission is to unleash the Girl Effect, as well as references to smoothing
the path for the [Girl Effect] revolution, with the somewhat more specific claim
that it is helping to transform the lives of adolescent girls living in poverty by
unleashing their potential and empowering them with the assets they need to
end poverty for themselves, their families and their community. See www.
girleffect.org/about/girl-hub/ (accessed 27 December 2013).
See also the special issue of Contestations on What Is Happening to Donor
Support for Womens Rights?, Issue 4, 2011.

Acknowledgments
An early draft of this article was presented at the International Studies
Association convention in San Diego, 2012. Thanks to Elizabeth Prugl
and Anne Runyan for their comments and encouragement. Thanks to
Susanne Soederberg for the many comments and conversations that have
been invaluable in developing the ideas that inform this article, as well as
to Genevieve LeBaron and the anonymous reviewers for their very useful
suggestions.

Notes on contributor
Adrienne Roberts is a Lecturer in International Politics at the University of
Manchester. Her interests are in the areas of feminist political economy, international political economy, debt and development. Recent works have been
published in Third World Quarterly, New Political Economy, Signs and Politics
& Gender.

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