Women and the ‘Business’ of Human Rights: The Problem with Women’s Empowerment Projects and the Need for Corporate Reform

Abstract

Corporate-led women’s empowerment initiatives appear, in their proactiveness, to be a welcome addition to a range of measures addressing adverse human rights impacts by business. This article questions the claim that these projects significantly advance women’s rights. Instead, they can be understood as a manifestation of what Catherine Rottenberg terms ‘neoliberal feminism’ with women at risk of being transformed into ‘gender capital’ for business gain. This article rejects the claim that empowerment can only be delivered by encouraging women into market-based work. Instead, it is argued that the corporate responsibility to respect the human rights of women can better be supported by reorienting business away from its preoccupation with delivering value for shareholders, towards an approach that values women’s unpaid socially reproductive labour.

Valuing Women’s Work: A framework for business on gender equality and decent work

“…At their most reductive, corporateled gender equality projects can be seen as another instrument privileging shareholder's interests over all else, yet this is not what company law demands. 11 Women's rights are human rights, and these are inalienable and should be upheld regardless of their value for business success.…”

Gender and Intersectionality in Business and Human Rights Scholarship

“…133 At the same time, poor racialized women from the Global South migrate to countries in the Global North, and other wealthy countries, to provide social reproductive labour in the domestic sphere, 134 to support the economic participation of privileged professional women. 135 Thus, systems of oppression converge to keep these women in violent and/or precarious situations. Intersectionality sheds light on how social relations are enmeshed with broader power structures and cannot be addressed without understanding the historical context that produces structures of disadvantage 136 upon which neoliberal capitalism is built and that remain at play in the BHR context.…”