II. Corporate-Led Women’s Empowerment Initiatives

Concerns about asymmetrical distributions of power are central to feminist scholarship and strategies. While feminist communities may diverge in their understandings of the precise role that power plays in the exclusion or subordination of women,Footnote ¹⁹ paradoxically transnational companies and global governance actors are converging on an idea of women’s empowerment that centres on their ability to participate in economic life. Corporate engagement with women has been framed in market-oriented terms, or what Sydney Calkin calls ‘the business case’.Footnote ²⁰ For Calkin, ‘gender equality claims have become visible through their mediation by the market and rhetorical reformulation along economistic lines.’Footnote ²¹ This coalescence by transnational companies, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and international actors such as the World Bank around the promotion of women’s equality as a benefit to business has been termed ‘transnational business feminism’ (TBF) by Adrienne Roberts.Footnote ²² Three inter-related ideas motivate TBF.Footnote ²³ First, and evident in debates about women board members, is the idea of women as post-financial crisis saviours of companies and the wider financial sector due to their presumed differences from men.Footnote ²⁴ Second is the notion of women as consumers and producers captured in the concept of ‘womenomics’. Third is the concern to empower women, particularly through the creation of entrepreneurship opportunities financed via the extension of microcredit in the development context.Footnote ²⁵

The range of corporate-sponsored women’s empowerment projects is vast. One difficulty in attempting to provide a comprehensive typology of these initiatives stems from the plural meanings and ways of measuring empowerment.Footnote ²⁶ For example, empowerment may be collective or individual; it may be measured subjectively or objectively; and it may refer to external obstacles or internal barriers.Footnote ²⁷ Gita Sen similarly points to the malleability of the term ‘empowerment’ and argues that the multi-dimensional and fluid nature of the concept risks ‘giving the appearance of promoting strong action without any intrinsic policy accountability for actually doing so’.Footnote ²⁸

Just as empowerment has been interpreted in diverse ways, corporate initiatives to empower women are also varied in their aims, methods and scope. As Sofie Tornhill argues, such diversity is to be ‘expected’Footnote ²⁹ given the plurality of businesses engaged in women’s empowerment projects. Calkin’s survey of transnational business initiatives includes ‘the Nike Foundation’s partnerships with the UK Department for International Development and the World Bank, the UN Women partnership with Coca Cola, the United Nations Foundation’s partnership with Exxon Mobile, USAID, and the Ford Foundation, the UN Global Compact, and a variety of partnerships between corporations and non-profits for empowerment including Goldman Sachs, Intel, and Hindustan Unilever, among others.’Footnote ³⁰ Regardless of the context in which these projects take place there are several common themes.

One factor is the sponsorship by private businesses of projects that overlap with support traditionally provided by the state, for example, education, access to the paid labour market, water and sanitation, and healthcare.Footnote ³¹

A second commonality is that many empowerment projects are promulgated by actors in wealthy countries for delivery in low income regions.Footnote ³² This is problematic as the ‘former discourses of colonial paternalism’Footnote ³³ are evident both in the promotion of a Global North vision of womanhood and economic justice to which others are invited to join, and in the characterization of women across the Global South as being in need of empowerment. As Ann Stewart notes, ‘economic globalization’ has been ‘built on imperial and colonial histories’.Footnote ³⁴ The lack of cultural sensitivity shown by initiatives that frame whole groups of women as economically unproductive and full of potential is redolent of colonialism and its (re)construction of distinct gender roles.Footnote ³⁵

A third site of coherence between many of these empowerment initiatives is their connection with the brands of their sponsors. Tornhill has observed that ‘corporate empowerment programs … can be conceived of as intrinsic, rather than surprising, parts of contemporary corporate legitimacy building.’Footnote ³⁶ Focusing on the economic benefits of empowerment as part of a ‘win-win’ rhetoric is attractive to corporate decision-makers seeking more creative ways of delivering value for investors. As Carol Liao has argued, ‘since CSR is able to co-exist alongside shareholder primacy … there tends to be little desire to reform the model in order to incorporate stakeholder interests beyond what companies are already driven to do from the market.’Footnote ³⁷

A final commonality is that rather than seeking to disrupt the negative internal and external impacts of business activities on the human rights of women, many corporate-sponsored empowerment projects are steeped in a neoliberal worldview that promotes self-help and entrepreneurialism as synonymous with empowerment. This approach ignores the reality that empowerment is not only economic.Footnote ³⁸ It is, at best, reductive in its portrayal of women as harbouring ‘latent power and confidence’Footnote ³⁹ that can be put to profitable use and, at worst, cynical in its instrumental treatment of women. Not all scholars agree, however, that we can read these projects as an example of women’s commodification by corporations. Tornhill, for example, argues that this is too simplistic and risks overstating the impact of many of these projects which ‘tend to be undermined by the precarious conditions in which they intervene’.Footnote ⁴⁰ Even if we concede that something more subtle is going on than treating women as mere commodities, I would argue that there is little doubt that women are being constituted as entrepreneurial subjects by the operation of these programmes and their capacities are being used to benefit economic growth.

Two high-profile examples of corporate-led women’s empowerment projects are illustrative of the tensions in this area. The Coca-Cola Company’s 5by20 campaign aims to ‘empower 5 million women entrepreneurs in 100 countries by 2020’.Footnote ⁴¹ The programme operates by providing women with ‘training in business and finance management, access to finance for enterprise growth, formation of self-help groups to create a support structure for participants and the provision of post-training support.’Footnote ⁴² The campaign allows Coca-Cola to gain access to previously hard-to-reach areas such as South African townships, thus assisting in its business expansion. Despite the rhetoric, the experiences of these micro-entrepreneurs suggest that the equation of participation in the programme with empowerment is overly simplistic. In her ethnographic study of the 5by20 campaign’s work in Mexico, Tornhill recounts how participants were typically framed as having untapped potential despite these women already labouring at home or engaging in paid work in the informal labour sector.Footnote ⁴³ Her observations of empowerment workshops led by Coca-Cola are unsettling. Well-intentioned advice to attendees to move outside their ‘comfort zone’ appeared to ignore the ‘brutality of the inequalities that define their everyday struggles to make a living’.Footnote ⁴⁴

Another initiative, Unilever’s Shakti project, operates by providing training and micro-loans to women in rural villages in India so that they can sell Unilever’s products as micro-entrepreneurs.Footnote ⁴⁵ Financial resources are important in transforming power dynamics but equating empowerment with extending loans to women to transform them into creditors has been treated with considerable scepticism.Footnote ⁴⁶ Although Linda Mayoux is ‘tentative’ about drawing conclusions on the efficacy of micro-finance as an empowerment strategy, given that its impact will depend on a range of cultural and contextual factors, she highlights that concerns have been raised about how micro-lending unsettles existing family dynamics and can result in women being treated as ‘unpaid debt collectors for development agencies’.Footnote ⁴⁷ Like 5by20, the Shakti initiative also operates on the logic of ‘win-win’ outcomes for all participants: women have access to increased income, Unilever can expand into rural India, and, as Elisabeth Prügl observes, ‘public authorities achieve a health outcome’ through the buying and selling of Unilever’s sanitary products.Footnote ⁴⁸

Despite the claims of empowerment made by the companies sponsoring these initiatives, there is considerable scepticism among scholars and practitioners about whether these projects result in any long-term and significant redistributions of economic power in favour of women. As Andrea Cornwall observes of the term ‘empowerment’, ‘[o]nce used to describe grassroots struggles to confront and transform unjust and unequal power relations, it has become a term used by an expansive discourse coalition of corporations, global non-governmental organizations, banks, philanthrocapitalists and development donors.’Footnote ⁴⁹ For Kabeer, the use of the term ‘empowerment’ by multiple actors to describe a range of activities has meant that the concept has ‘gradually neutralised its original political edge’.Footnote ⁵⁰ Such depoliticization of the more radical idea of empowerment – a process of moving from being disempowered to acquiring the capacity for meaningful choice over one’s lifeFootnote ⁵¹ – has been accompanied by a corporate worldview that prioritizes encouraging more women into the paid work of the market and providing them with economic resources such as credit as the optimal ways of achieving a raft of development and equality goals.Footnote ⁵² Moreover, it is the companies themselves who are shaping what it means to be empowered rather than respecting the agency of the projects’ participants.

The ideological objective of partnering women with business to achieve the linked goals of market expansion and poverty eradication appears, intuitively, to offer ‘a compelling proposition’.Footnote ⁵³ As Catherine Dolan observes, these projects promise ‘a new form of inclusive capitalism that simultaneously cleanses development of its paternalist and interventionist heritage and repositions capital accumulation as moral.’Footnote ⁵⁴ It is no coincidence that these initiatives have gained momentum in the years following the 2008 global financial crisis, where concerns emerged that companies and financial markets were lacking a robust ‘ethical foundation’Footnote ⁵⁵ and that ‘[i]mproved gender equality is associated with … faster economic growth’.Footnote ⁵⁶ Yet, these projects offer very limited critique of how macro-economic policies and corporate practices create and entrench the very inequalities that the empowerment initiatives are supposed to address.Footnote ⁵⁷ Instead they risk embedding essentialist notions of feminized work (the ‘nimble-fingered’ factory workerFootnote ⁵⁸ or micro-entrepreneur selling beauty products) and racialized stereotypes of women in the Global South. As Rafia Zakaria puts it:Footnote ⁵⁹

III. Critiquing the ‘Feminism’ of Corporate-Led Women’s Empowerment Initiatives

While the engagement of business actors with women’s empowerment has made gender inequality more visible, a body of feminist literature has expressed unease at the apparent co-opting of feminism by neoliberalism or, perhaps to put it more accurately, the coalescence of business actors around a purported strand of ‘feminist’ thinking that is embedded in the logic and language of markets. The reason for such circumspection on the part of feminist scholars lies in the absence of any acknowledgement of, or challenge to, the structural operations of the patriarchy. Rather than confront their own role in women’s subjugation, companies have used the language of feminism to deflect attention through empowerment initiatives. Corporations have expanded their reach through partnerships in the Global South and cultivated a new pool of cheap, precarious labour in the name of women’s empowerment. This has been rendered legitimate by the norm of shareholder primacy, which privileges shareholder interests and externalizes costs associated with the negative social impacts of corporate behaviour. Before addressing in Section IV how companies might work for the advancement of the human rights of women, this part of the paper considers the implications of corporate actors’ appropriation of feminist vocabulary.

The corporate interest in women is mirrored by a general rise in discussions of feminism and gender equality, a move which Sarah Banet-Weiser has termed ‘popular feminism’.Footnote ⁶⁰ The growing number of organizations with gender empowerment as their mission has emerged ‘within a particular historical moment … one of neoliberal capitalism and new labour markets, one in which class identities are seen to have disappeared, leaving in their wake the independent, entrepreneurial subject’.Footnote ⁶¹ The ensuing ‘market for empowerment’Footnote ⁶² has, argues Banet-Weiser, positioned women and girls as ‘both in crisis and a powerful consumer’ with products and campaigns designed to capture this ‘commodified girl power’.Footnote ⁶³ Corporate-led empowerment projects can, therefore, be viewed as part of a broader landscape in which companies are finding in women new forms of profit enhancement. The socially reproductive labour upon which capitalist production dependsFootnote ⁶⁴ is taken for granted while the pool of productive labour is expanded by claims that empowerment can be found through paid work. The point here is not that paid work for women is unimportant – to argue this is to risk confining women to the domestic sphere – but that the coding of many women as hitherto ‘unproductive’ both belittles the work of social reproduction where many are engaged and offers no critique of the macroeconomic and societal forces that perpetuate women’s relative disempowerment. As Nanette Funk has observed, ‘[n]eoliberal IMF structural adjustment programs … wiped out women’s work as the majority of subsistence farmers, leaving few options other than going to cities for paid “Mcjobs” … taking microcredit loans, entering prostitution, doing reproductive labour for first-world women’.Footnote ⁶⁵ Financial actors, however, are silent on how their policies have enabled the conditions where women have been drawn further into precarity, while companies have offered no reflection on how globalized modes of production have benefited from the exploitation of women’s labour. Corporate initiatives to empower women are therefore more reflective of a present-day, popular brand of ‘feminism’, which taps into the neoliberal language of investing in yourself as a market player. Proclamations by highly visible, usually white, middle-class women in the Global North such as Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In Footnote ⁶⁶ and Ivanka Trump’s Women Who Work: Rewriting the Rules for Success Footnote ⁶⁷ are further examples of how ‘feminism’ is being publicly signalled, but in ways that are entirely in tune with and palatable to contemporary corporatism.

How might we make theoretical sense of the corporate-sponsored empowerment projects that are emerging now? What does it mean for businesses to be shaping the content of ‘feminism’? And can empowerment projects lacking in critique of structural gendered power inequalities be considered feminist?

It is important to note that despite a popular tendency to assume a feminist orthodoxy, feminist scholarship is expressive of significant diversity.Footnote ⁶⁸ There is, however, a risk when classifying the complexity of feminist thought into distinct theoretical approaches that we engage in ‘simplistic categorisation’Footnote ⁶⁹ or fragmentation into a terrain marked by ‘contradiction, complexity, and paradox’.Footnote ⁷⁰ Indeed, bell hooks describes the plurality of meanings ascribed to feminism as being ‘a central problem’ of the movement.Footnote ⁷¹ For hooks, feminism can best be described as ‘the struggle to end sexist oppression.’Footnote ⁷² Rejecting what she terms ‘lifestyle feminism’, which endorses the idea ‘that there could be as many versions of feminism as there were women’,Footnote ⁷³ hooks argues that feminism lost its way when ‘[m]ost women, especially privileged white women, ceased even to consider revolutionary feminist visions, once they began to gain economic power within the existing social structure.’Footnote ⁷⁴ Vanessa Munro also suggests that all feminist thought is ‘committed at its most fundamental level to highlighting the historical and contemporary sites of women’s exclusion and/or subordination, to exploring the material, structural and ideological conditions that create and perpetuate this condition, and to making demands for their eradication’.Footnote ⁷⁵ These definitions of feminism, therefore, invoke a concern to address gendered power disparities and structural oppression and exclusion. Yet, it is precisely a critique of the structural nature of inequality that is missing from the ‘feminism’ of the current corporate-led women’s empowerment lobby.

The atomized, individualistic approach to empowerment promoted by business is rooted in self-improvement and therefore more palatable to companies as a form of ‘feminism’ that does not challenge the status quo. Rottenberg has termed this phenomenon ‘neoliberal feminism’. Explaining the term, she observes, ‘while it very clearly avows gender inequality – thus, I believe, differentiating it from a postfeminist sensibility – it simultaneously disavows the socio-economic and cultural structures shaping our lives.’Footnote ⁷⁶ Rottenberg locates this form of feminism in the rise of ‘high-powered women [who] are publicly and unabashedly espousing feminism.’Footnote ⁷⁷ She argues that this new variant of ‘feminist’ thought is ‘part of a conversion process the aim of which is to transform women into neoliberal human capital’.Footnote ⁷⁸ A woman is framed not only as an ‘entrepreneurial subject’ and ‘encouraged to take her own personal initiative in order to improve her career prospects, particularly in the corporate world’,Footnote ⁷⁹ but is constituted as an ‘individual enterprise’.Footnote ⁸⁰

Rottenberg’s insights help illuminate the rationale behind the expansion of companies into the realm of gender equality initiatives in the apparent pursuit of women’s empowerment. Although her thesis is most directly relevant to the corporate work environment and the concerns of middle-class women attempting to reconcile work and family life, it is her observation that this form of feminism has ‘also become increasingly compatible with neoliberal … political and economic agendas’Footnote ⁸¹ that reveals the pernicious nature of neoliberal feminism. It is difficult to diagnose the point at which neoliberal feminism can be identified as an entirely new epoch in companies’ relationships with women, or whether it represents an intensification of the exploitation of women to meet the appeals of liberal feminism. Speaking of neoliberal feminism’s close relation, popular feminism,Footnote ⁸² Banet-Weiser has argued that it ‘owe[s] a debt to liberal feminism’s critique of gendered exclusions in the public and corporate spheres … this corporate-friendly popular feminism emanates from an increasing visibility of a gendered disparity in dominant economic spheres’.Footnote ⁸³ There are certainly similarities between neoliberal and liberal feminism. As with neoliberal feminism, ‘feminists have denounced liberalism as a theoretical approach with insufficient radical potential to expose the roots of women’s subordination or to articulate principles for a society of gender justice’.Footnote ⁸⁴ Martha Nussbaum, however, offers a defence of liberalism for its focus on the values of independence and autonomy.Footnote ⁸⁵ While few could object to liberalism’s premise that individuals are of equal worth, a tension arises in liberal feminism’s demand for formal equality without removing the structural barriers that inhibit women’s full participation in economic and democratic life on the same basis as men (such as women’s disproportionate role in socially reproductive labour). In demanding formal equality between men and women, liberal feminism is often accused of asking women to assimilate into institutions that were shaped around the male experience.Footnote ⁸⁶ A more positive interpretation of liberalism is that ‘it is primarily driven by its commitment to free choice’, which does not necessarily entail a focus on the individual, atomized self.Footnote ⁸⁷ Implicit in the freedom to determine one’s life is an absence of structural barriers that would deny a woman the ability to exercise genuine choice.

Rottenberg describes the difference between liberalism and neoliberalism in the following terms:

This ‘new variant of feminism’ has, argues Rottenberg, ‘been unsettlingly unmoored from key liberal political goals such as equality, justice and emancipation.’Footnote ⁸⁹ In contrast to the liberal sphere where there was a conceptual separation of domestic and public life, under neoliberal feminism a woman’s networks, friendships and private interests ‘are now carefully remade into forms of investment’.Footnote ⁹⁰ Whereas liberal feminism has been characterized as requiring modifications largely from within the established order (advocating for equality laws so that women can participate in the market on the same basis as men, for example) yet ignoring the fact that women continued to perform most socially reproductive labour,Footnote ⁹¹ neoliberal feminism appears to simultaneously ignore and exploit the domestic sphere. Women in the Global South, who are already significant contributors to the economy through under-recognized work (care) and under-valued work (feminized occupations), are labelled as unproductive or an untapped resource that the market can put to gainful use. At the same time, the friendships and connections of these women are recognized as ready-made distribution networks that multinationals can use to expand their consumer pool. Moreover, in the shift from liberal to neoliberal feminism, state responsibilities seem to be further eroded. If liberal feminism demanded legislative reform to ensure equal pay and equal opportunities, neoliberal feminism appears almost to erase the role of the state entirely. Microcredit loans, for example, have replaced the state’s responsibility for citizen welfare and have put the onus on women to turn themselves into enterprises ‘making [them] responsible for their own economic well-being’.Footnote ⁹² Given the dominance of corporations in public discourse, it is problematic that the language of feminism has been captured by business and used by it to shape a distinctly individualistic, economic, and private view of women’s empowerment.

The interconnected nature of social production and global markets has also served to highlight a further paradox at the heart of the women’s empowerment movement.Footnote ⁹³ Not only do these projects tend to rely on those with relative privilege speaking ‘for their underprivileged sisters on the basis of a deep and unproblematized gender essentialism’,Footnote ⁹⁴ it also relies on those ‘underprivileged sisters’ to perform the affective labour that allows others to ‘lean in’ to their paid employment. It appears blind to ‘the social significance of racism, classism, or (hetero)sexism as institutionalized systems of power’Footnote ⁹⁵ and assumes a homogenous ‘feminist’ worldview informed by the Global North.Footnote ⁹⁶ The reality is that ‘most often, women of colour, poor and immigrant women serve as the unacknowledged care workers who enable professional women to strive towards “balance” in their lives,’Footnote ⁹⁷ meaning that care and informal labour, in which women are disproportionately represented, is rendered even less visible and unimportant. The label of neoliberal feminism is thus deeply ironic as Calkin considers it ‘more like [feminism’s] “uncanny double” which endorses a package of neoliberal reforms in the name of women’s empowerment.’Footnote ⁹⁸ This concern is echoed by Hester Eisenstein who has argued that business is facilitating ‘a form of pseudo-feminism to bolster profitability and to further legitimise the increasingly perilous form of globalised capitalism that we are living under’.Footnote ⁹⁹ For Eisenstein, there is a deep contradiction between ‘flashy and highly publicised’ women’s empowerment initiatives while ‘the macroeconomic operations of the global financial institutions … systematically and cruelly destroy the capacities of nation-states to feed, clothe, house, educate and provide work to all of their citizens.’Footnote ¹⁰⁰

IV. Corporate Reform

On the surface, corporate-led women’s empowerment projects appear to promise action on the part of corporations to respect the human rights of women. A closer analysis, however, reveals that women participants in empowerment projects are instead at risk of being used as ‘a form of gender capital’ in order to further corporate goals.Footnote ¹⁰¹ Drawing on the observation that we cannot continue to offer ‘individual solutions to structural problems’ in this area,Footnote ¹⁰² in this part of the paper, I suggest two areas of focus for further work. The first is to challenge the exploitation of women’s socially reproductive labour. The second is to challenge the ‘shareholder primacy’ norm.

Lauren McCarthy has argued that the ‘gendered CSR’ of which women’s empowerment initiatives are illustrative can never resolve imbalances in gender power relations unless two critical factors are addressed. The first is unpaid care work, which falls disproportionately on women.Footnote ¹⁰³ Care and the relational act of caring are universal experiences.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ However, they are not typically treated as legal concepts and are often seen as falling within the ‘unregulated’ domestic realm.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ This results in care being treated as something largely beyond the scope of regulationFootnote ¹⁰⁶ and often invisible.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ As Nicole Busby and Grace James contend, ‘the liberal subject, unencumbered by ties of dependency’ is typically assumed to be ‘the correct normative model against which all targets for legal and policy intervention should be judged’.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ Participants in corporate empowerment projects are therefore framed as currently unproductive and bursting with untapped potential because their contribution of unpaid socially reproductive labour is both assumed and invisible within capitalist systems of production. Economic emancipation through participation in the paid labour market is then promulgated as empowering and synonymous with poverty eradication even though ‘women’s poverty is more than insufficient economic resources because poverty is not a gender-neutral experience. Women’s poverty is the lack of resources coupled with gendered socio-cultural norms that exclude and devalue women.’Footnote ¹⁰⁹ This more complex definition of poverty shows why encouraging women to borrow in order to fund entrepreneurial activity for example cannot, on its own, lead to sincere empowerment. Even a more expansive vision of empowerment not predicated on paid employment or financial borrowing – such as participation in social and political life, advancing in education, or bodily security free from harassment – is impossible to achieve fully if the labour of care is not made visible and appreciated. The women’s empowerment movement and the neoliberal feminist ideology it represents are examples of how ‘financial capitalism reinvents itself precisely by incorporating its critics’.Footnote ¹¹⁰ In this context, the corporate practice of exploiting socially reproductive labour for its own ends is put beyond the scope of enquiry while genuine equality for women remains elusive.

The second factor raised by McCarthy is the ‘gendered macroeconomic context’ in which corporate women’s empowerment initiatives are being played out.Footnote ¹¹¹ This includes how companies behave in the global political economy and the regulatory environment that governs their operations. As Beate Sjåfjell puts it, ‘at the heart of the BHR problem is the failure of company law…[which] has for far too long been left out of the discussion of how to improve the impact business has on society.’Footnote ¹¹² For Sjåfjell, ‘reforming company law is key to securing business respect for human rights’.Footnote ¹¹³ One area of company law which requires attention is the privileging of shareholders as it is this focus that has informed the exploitation of women as human capital in the empowerment initiatives discussed above. The conceptualization of companies in law as private bodies run for the purpose of enhancing value for shareholders and with limited interference from the state has significant consequences for the place of other stakeholders in this paradigm.Footnote ¹¹⁴

The prioritization of shareholder interests is supported by economic agency theory, which maintains that privileging shareholder concerns is justified due to their relationship of residual risk with the company. In this economic model, the company is a ‘legal fiction which serves as a nexus for contracting relationships’.Footnote ¹¹⁵ While other stakeholders such as employees are presumed to have complete contracts, the contract between the directors and shareholders is presumed incomplete given the lack of clarity about what the shareholder might receive in return for their capital contribution. Shareholders are preferred during the life of a company partly to compensate for this residual risk but also because focusing on profit is thought, arguably incorrectly, to benefit other stakeholders whose interests are also served by a profitable company.Footnote ¹¹⁶

The problem with the norm of shareholder primacy is that it has come to define the purpose of companies. Yet, as Lorraine Talbot argues, privileging shareholders over other stakeholders represents a ‘political choice’ adopted by those promoting a ‘neoliberal agenda’.Footnote ¹¹⁷ It is not a doctrinally conclusive account of company law, which is clear that directors of a company owe duties to the company as a separate legal person and not to investors.Footnote ¹¹⁸ This then begs the question of why shareholders are still given primacy. Lynn Stout, similarly to Talbot, argues that the idea of ‘shareholder value’ that emerged in recent decades is a legal myth yet one that has become pervasive as the focus for boards.Footnote ¹¹⁹ The lack of convincing legal arguments for the hegemony of the shareholder primacy norm suggests that a choice has been made to favour the providers of financial capital. Andrew Johnston and Talbot argue that this has led to companies playing a crucial role in bolstering irresponsible capitalism by privileging shareholders’ desire for profit maximization over social needs.Footnote ¹²⁰ Similary, David Bilchitz and Laura Ausserladscheider Jonas contend that the shareholder value approach ‘clashes fundamentally with the normative foundations of fundamental rights, which require the fundamental interests of individuals never to be treated purely as instruments for the achievement of the ends of others.’Footnote ¹²¹

Shareholder primacy has therefore developed as the presumed, dominant purpose of business because company law is silent on what a company should be for and whose interests should be respected. This has led to a proposal for the company to be given a clear purpose of ‘creating “sustainable value within planetary boundaries”.’Footnote ¹²² ‘Sustainable value’ is then defined in an expansive way to include ‘respecting the rights of its members, investors, employees, and other contractual parties, and promoting good governance, decent work and equality, and the human rights of its workers and affected communities and peoples.’Footnote ¹²³

Barnali Choudhury and Martin Petrin offer another interpretation of corporate purpose. Their thesis does not stipulate a single objective but argues that the correct corporate purpose ‘lies on an axis between purely shareholder wealth maximization, other stakeholders’ interests, and public interests’.Footnote ¹²⁴ As such, they consider it ‘appropriate for corporate governance policies to include public goals as long as they do not unduly advance one constituency’s interests over another’s.’Footnote ¹²⁵ Their thesis can provide space for a more radical feminist approach to women’s empowerment because, as hooks has argued, feminism is not about privileging one group’s interests over another or women’s concerns over those of men.Footnote ¹²⁶

How we get from the status quo of shareholder primacy to a model that does not insist on the transformation of women into mini-enterprises for corporate gain is an important future focus for scholars working in BHR. As dispiriting as the corporate-led women’s empowerment movement may appear for substantive equality, there are sources of optimism. As Funk reminds us, it is too simplistic to claim that all women’s empowerment NGOs have partnered with business to legitimate the turn to neoliberalism; many continue to challenge structures of inequality.Footnote ¹²⁷ Moreover, the scholarship that has emerged in recent years critiquing the latest ruse by neoliberal economics to exploit women for its benefit can serve to energize feminist scholars and activists to find new ways of tackling inequalities of power.