Corporate Feminism and Why It’s So Harmful

By Sophie Chang

Sheryl Sandberg. Hillary Clinton. What do both of these women have in common? They’re both extremely well-known, and they’re both corporate feminists. What is corporate feminism? We’ll discuss that next.

As evidenced by the name, corporate feminism takes place mainly in corporate settings where women are a minority in the workforce. As a result, many professional women end up adopting the mindset that in order to succeed in their job, they have to push down their enemies and competitors, namely other women. The reason why this is so detrimental is because instead of building each other up and supporting each other through their journeys and struggles, women in the corporate world end up playing against each other, something that’ll ultimately lead to everyone’s demise. We as women are each other’s biggest supporters, but we’re also our biggest enemies as well, and if we can’t stand by each other and support one another we’ll never be able to achieve gender equality in the workforce.

So now that we know what corporate feminists are, we now have to answer this question: what do they believe in?

Corporate feminists today believe in the myth of the “trickle-down” policy, or the idea that by putting women in positions of power, they’ll be able to help more women, thus encouraging more and more females to join the workforce and topple the patriarchy. Despite however good it may sound on paper, the trickle-down effect just doesn’t work because it presents a challenging moral problem for feminism.

We as a social justice movement are focused on gender equality for the ones who need it most: namely women. If we lend our help to white women first, won’t that go against everything we believe in? Women are the gender who face the most sexism, but within that category, women of color have been suffering consistently more than white women. For example, a study conducted by Pew Research Center in 2015 found that while white women may earn $17 per hour, Black women only earn $13, and Hispanic women earn even less as $12 per hour. It’s obvious that women of color need our help more than white women, so why aren’t we helping them first? In giving our support to the women of color who need it the most, we’ll not only be creating a more racially inclusive environment (something that feminism needs to improve upon) but also constructing a more diverse workplace as well.

Ultimately, the core problem comes down to inclusivity in the feminist movement. We as feminists need to be able and willing to expand our movement to all women from all different types of backgrounds and, at the end of the day, present a unified front.