Feminist perspectives on inequalities have been long been eclipsed from discussions on business and human rights (BHR). When efforts have been made to put a ‘gender lens’ on business and human rights, these have often been underpinned by neoliberal thinking and the related ‘business case’ for gender equality that merely seeks to insert women into existing markets and labour relations. Rarely is gender addressed as an issue that requires the radical transformation of deep-seated patriarchal, racist and colonial power structures across all areas of business activity. A feminist approach to BHR demands not only revised methodologies for identifying human rights harms, but also the development of new responses to such harm. As guest editors for the Special Issue of the BHRJ, we were inspired by our belief in the potential of feminist theories, methods and practices to provide new perspectives on and solutions to the human rights impacts of business activities.

Bodies and Embodiment

Many of the pieces in the Special Issue highlight the ways in which bodies, gender constructs and sex-based attributes are commodified by business actors and draw attention to the urgent need for enhanced state regulation and human rights due diligence in these sectors. The female sexual and reproductive wellness industry is an extremely lucrative and largely unregulated market that is underpinned by government failures to provide accessible and good quality reproductive and sexual health care and education.While for-profit commercial surrogacy providers have been the subject of some attention from governments and human rights advocates, the role played by not-for-profit transborder surrogacy organisations in facilitating these international transactions has not yet been scrutinized. Businesses have also leveraged their marketing and advertising reach to propagate toxic masculinities and harmful tropes about girls’ sexuality through online media campaigns targeted at children.

One of the key insights to emerge from the different contributions is that the typical BHR narrative of women as helpless victims of corporate human rights abuses is limiting and fails to recognise and support the agency that many feminist movements are already exercising. In Colombia, indigenous women human rights defenders have organised to resist the mega-projects that are threatening the rights of people in their communities. Through their ‘braided’ political actions they have managed to overcome the embodied silencing practices that have been directed at them as indigenous women circumventing traditional social norms.

Women’s Positionality in the Marketplace

Almost all of the pieces in the collection reflect upon long-standing feminist inquiries around the so-called public/private divide, the boundaries of productive and reproductive labour and the economic value ascribed to both. The contributions also interrogate the ways in which gendered and colonial assumptions influence understandings of foundational BHR concepts such as ‘the corporation’.

Globalfashion supply chains are characterised by an unsustainable and unacknowledged dependence on women’s informal and unpaid labour, and opaque buyer–supplier contractual structures. In the same way, the prevalence of sexual harassment within floriculture value chains reposes upon structural power imbalances. The failures of governments to take appropriate steps to regulate informal economies has distinctively gendered human rights impacts. The Colombian mining sector is characterised by high levels of gender-based violence and discrimination as well as a concentration of women in informal mining enterprises that operate outside of the purview of state regulation. Similar public/private dynamics related to the invisibility of women’s reproductive and informal work led to the exclusion of women from remedial schemes following the Doce River dam disaster in Brazil. Across each of these economic sectors, feminist perspectives can enable the construction of more holistic and effective normative approaches to prevent, identify and remedy business human rights abuses.

The adoption of feminist approaches to BHR could provide a transformative counterpoint to existing gender mainstreaming initiatives which tend to reinforce the unequal status quo. The multitude of corporate ‘women’s empowerment’ projects that seek to improve women’s status within market-based work could be reimagined so that they recognise and value women’s unpaid socially reproductive labour. In the same way, feminist inquiries that open up discussions around the colonial and gendered origins of ‘the company’ and its legal status provide scope for the potential development of new and more just corporate forms.

Borderlessness

Another recurring theme that weaves its way through the different contributions is borderlessness and the gendered dialectics between local and global technologies as well as the ways in which global BHR norms are implemented in local and sector specific contexts. The roll out of digital technologies for personal identification is a phenomenon being promoted by international development actors in partnership with the private sector. In Kenya, new digital ID systems are grounded in historical colonial and patriarchal power relations that must be challenged and remedied in order to prevent them from entrenching and perpetuating these inequalities. Several contributions examine failures to adequately implement international human rights standards on sex and gender discrimination within BHR frameworks. This is the case both with the UN Standards of Conduct for Business on Tackling Discrimination against LGBTI People and in the context of international codes of conduct for private military and security companies.

Feminist approaches to BHR demand that we recognise that the structures of harm to which BHR responds are intersectional, fluid and context-specific. Gender is a distinctly relational construct and attention to the distribution of power and resources among people is critical for understanding how their engendered rights and responsibilities are exercised. It is our hope that these reflections will act as a springboard for further conversations on gender, exclusion and silencing in BHR theory and practice.

Nora Götzmann, Joanna Bourke Martignoni, Bonita Meyersfeld and Harpreet Kaur (Guest Editors).

Read the full special issue here. A webinar with the guest editors will take place on 22 March; register here.