Corporations, gender equality and women’s empowerment: feminismco-opted?

Gregoratti, Catia; Roberts, Adrienne; Tornhill, Sofie

doi:10.4337/9781785362538.00012

Cited by 13 publications

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“…There are several epistemic assumptions that undergird this problem representation. Several discursive elements appear to echo the discursive tropes of the 'business case for gender equality' popularised in the 2000s by the World Bank, as well as earlier efficiency approaches to women in development (WID) (Chant and Sweetman, 2012;Gregoratti et al, 2018) a neoliberal logic that also tends to permeate statist understandings of women's empowerment within and beyond borders. What empowerment is taken to mean is to offer women the opportunity to work and combine paid work with responsibilities for dependants and households (JRF, 2018b).…”

Section: Ikea and Jrf's Problem Representationmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Such economic strategies of empowerment have been identified as hallmarks of neoliberal development cloaked under a feminist face (Prügl, 2015;Roberts, 2015). An assumption running through this discourse is that the offerings of vocational trainings or work can lift women and their families out of poverty, reduce the costs of refugee assistance while also contributing to economic growth (Gregoratti et al, 2018;Oliver and Boyle, 2019;Tornhill, 2019). Yet, such promises rarely problematise the location of refugee women within intersecting categories of oppression.…”

Section: The Refugee Woman Her Saviours and Schemes Of Improvementmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Neoliberal Turns in Global Humanitarian Governance

Rosamond

Gregoratti

2020

Journal of Humanitarian Affairs

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In this article we seek to extend recent debates on how the promotion of self-reliance through vocational training and entrepreneurship has become the new neoliberal mantra among refugee-supporting agencies, policymakers and humanitarian actors. More specifically, we do so in the context of corporate and celebrity-endorsed humanitarian partnerships and initiatives that single out refugee women and girls. Informed by postcolonial feminist scholarship and guided by Carol Bacchi’s ‘what is the problem represented to be’ (WPR) approach we compare IKEA’s partnership with the Jordan River Foundation (JRF) in Jordan and Angelina Jolie’s support for the RefuSHE project in Kenya. While differences between the two problem representations exist, both initiatives seek to empower refugee women by activating latent entrepreneurial abilities. These, we conclude, reinforce a saviour/saved humanitarian logic while also obscuring the gender division of responsibilities and precarious nature of artisanal labour.

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Section: Ikea and Jrf's Problem Representationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: The Refugee Woman Her Saviours and Schemes Of Improvementmentioning

confidence: 99%

Neoliberal Turns in Global Humanitarian Governance

Rosamond

Gregoratti

2020

Journal of Humanitarian Affairs

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“…61 Such an ideological framing emphasizes individualism and free market capitalism, but tends to ignore other structural social and political inequalities, such as systematic legal discrimination, gender-based violence, and denial of human rights, that women and men experience worldwide. 62…”

Section: Resourcesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Feminist Foreign Policy 3.0: Advancing Ethics and Gender Equality in Global Politics

Rosamond¹,

Aggestam²

2019

SAIS Review of International Affairs

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and the United Kingdom, have adopted gender-and feminist-informed approaches to their foreign and security policies. Sweden's feminist foreign policy was launched in 2014 and rests on the idea that gender equality is central to security and foreign policy. This article conducts an analysis of the incremental development of Sweden's feminist foreign policy. It underlines three pillars that have informed Swedish foreign policy: rights, representation, and resources. The article assesses how these three pillars have been transformed into distinct policy and practice. It makes the following three conclusions. First, Sweden's feminist foreign policy is distinguished by its working method pertaining to norm change whereby gendered practices and structures in global politics are challenged. Second, from the outset Sweden's feminist foreign policy has pursued a head-wind agenda, which reflects a readiness to confront contestation in global politics. Third, as a way of tackling resistance and promoting pro-norm equality diffusion a fourth "R" has been advanced, which stands for reality checks and research.

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“…Due to this restricted definition of gender equality and the subsequent failure to acknowledge the role of income inequality, the WB is unable to truly promote the needs of women. Going one step further, this regime shift may be interpreted as an attempt at feminist co-option 8 and the discursive appropriation of social justice principles to further embed capitalist relations. 9–11…”

Section: Background: the World Bank Crisis And Womenmentioning

confidence: 99%

New Ways or Old Tricks? The World Bank’s Gender Strategy and Its Implications for Health

Power

2019

Int J Health Serv

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This paper provides a critical examination of the World Bank’s document, “World Bank Group Gender Strategy: Gender Equality, Poverty Reduction, and Inclusive Growth.” While the World Bank suggests that this paper is a distinction from past practices, others maintain that it is a continuation of previous neoliberal strategies. Thus, the aim of this analysis is to elucidate the implications of the proposed strategies on both gender equality and health equity. The analytical framework derives from both feminist political economy and the political economy of health literature. Within the document there is a direct emphasis on privatization and deregulation. Moreover, there is a clear re-articulation of both the state and female-citizenship: the former is presented as an “enabling agent,” and the latter depoliticized. Accordingly, it is argued that the promotion of macroeconomic strategies leads to the exaggeration of gender inequalities due to the perpetuation and crystallization of social inequalities. This consequently leads to the entrenchment of health inequities. These health inequities are compounded by the promotion of a “reduced state” that focuses on constructing a “workfare” state and a citizen who is resigned to community politics. Thus, instead of promoting gender equality, this report reflects a tendency toward its perpetuation.

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Corporations, gender equality and women’s empowerment: feminismco-opted?

Cited by 13 publications

References 0 publications

Neoliberal Turns in Global Humanitarian Governance

Neoliberal Turns in Global Humanitarian Governance

Feminist Foreign Policy 3.0: Advancing Ethics and Gender Equality in Global Politics

New Ways or Old Tricks? The World Bank’s Gender Strategy and Its Implications for Health

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