FLOURISHING FEMINISM
When I talk about feminism in business, I mean Flourishing Feminism.
As opposed to the watered-down, bro-appropriated, superficial feminisms we’re used to seeing from corporations, celebrity executives, and conventional entrepreneurs.
You know the one. The “feminism” (ironic quotes intended) a business displays to look progressive while still supporting the powers that be. The kind that empowers a few individuals without threatening the illegitimate power hierarchies of class, race, ability, sexuality, sex, and gender expression. The so-called feminism that conventional business allows, precisely because it isn’t actually challenging anything.
That's not what we're doing here.
And no, I’m not talking about that other kind of flourishing, either. This isn’t corporate wellness, where “flourishing” means you’re happy, productive, and on track for promotion. Flourishing is not an individual achievement. It’s a collective phenomenon. Real flourishing depends on the interindependence of all living things, and it can’t be pursued for some of us while the rest go without.
THE GOAL
Flourishing for all is the goal of feminism, and the focus of feminist business.
Flourishing requires feminism at full strength, in all its power. Flourishing Feminism names our goal out loud: not empowerment, not parity, not a seat at the table. Flourishing. For all people and all living things.
It’s something we practice and advocate everywhere, not just in politics or culture, but especially in business.
Businesses can be sites of social change and social justice, if we choose to make them so.
HOW I DEFINE FEMINISM
Feminism is a movement to:
01
End sexism and all* oppressions
02
Establish political, social, and economic equality
03
Create a world in which all people and all living things flourish
*When I say all oppressions, I mean not only patriarchy, misogyny, and sexism, but also racism, settler colonialism, heterosexism, classism, speciesism, capitalism, ageism, imperialism, nativism, ableism, fatphobia, literally all oppressions.
THE THREE PILLARS
Flourishing Feminism is Collective, Inclusive, and Transformational.
Collective
Feminism is a group project, not an avenue for individual advancement. It's work we do for the whole, for groups we don't even belong to. Work that only works when we do it together.
You've heard of "lean in" feminism, "girl boss" feminism. Both tell us that success is what happens when one woman pays close attention to her own needs and her own perspective. But any strategy for promoting an individual woman that does not simultaneously address the liberation of all women and all people is not adequately feminist. It's just getting a token woman or two better seats on the deck of a ship that's sinking to the bottom.
Inclusive
Feminism aims to end not only gender oppression but also oppressions of race, class, ability, and more. (Inclusive means more than intersectional. It includes all forms of oppression and all movements against oppression, all kinds of identities, the whole gamut of standpoints.)
Here's why the whole list matters. All systems of oppression, patriarchy, sexism, and misogyny, and also white supremacy, settler colonialism, heterosexism, transphobia, ableism, nativism, capitalism, reflect the same fundamental lie: that some humans are better than others, deserve more than others, and should profit by controlling and taking from others.
One "us," many "thems." Which is why we can use what we understand about sex- and gender-based oppression as a lever for challenging illegitimate power everywhere it operates.
Our collective will not flourish until we are all equally free and valued.
Transformational
Feminism is not about getting women, females, and gender-diverse people evenly distributed across the current system. We don't want to be equals in a sick system. A strategy that just moves people around inside the current system only gets a few people "more equal" in a system that was built to structure, legitimate and sustain inequality overall.
So Flourishing Feminism focuses not on changing an individual's options, but on changing the system itself. It starts by analyzing problems and opposing oppression, and then goes further, to envision and enact the future we want to see. Somebody once told me feminism is science fiction, and they were right. It carries a constructive force, a forward-looking force that imagines what the world could actually be.
This definition didn't come from Wikipedia.
It comes from decades of writing by feminists and from my own analysis and insights. I built it in Feminism: A Key Idea for Business and Society (Routledge, 2020), and I’ve been putting it to work with founders since I created the Feminist Business Model Canvas™ in 2016.
Why Collective, Inclusive, Transformational & Flourishing
After a keynote I gave at the first Entrepreneurial Feminist Forum, a woman came up to me in tears.
She ran a business. She’d come for the “women in business” conversation — that part interested her. Feminism itself, she hadn’t expected to be for her. She told me that with my definition of feminism, she finally felt included.
I knew from the jump, when we launched Feminists At Work, and every day since, what most people in any room would assume.
- Business people would be bracing for a lecture.
- Feminists would start by sizing me up — a straight, white, married, credentialed professional — and deciding they already knew what kind of feminism I'd be selling.
- Other women would be expecting a ‘lean in’ pep talk.
I’d known since college that business is one of the most powerful, most overlooked engines we have for political, social, and economic change — because business runs through almost every part of daily life, whether we notice it or not. And I’d watched plenty of people try to make business nicer — thriving, positive, compassionate — without ever touching what actually makes it unfair: an owner-takes-most system, sitting untouched underneath all the niceness.
I didn't want nicer.
I wanted feminism, at full strength, applied to business on purpose.
That meant saying clearly the feminism I wasn’t doing. I wasn’t doing corporate feminism or girlboss feminism — one woman climbing and calling it progress while everyone below her stays exactly where she started. And I wasn’t doing white feminism — treating sex and gender as the only axis of oppression that counts.
The Liberation Gap
The distance between one woman's freedom and everyone else's, wide open the moment she stops climbing to look back. If she looks back.
This feminism is:
Collective
Because liberation is not a ladder you climb alone.
Inclusive
Because all oppression is linked. If it props up unearned privilege or blocks anyone from flourishing, it’s a feminist issue, whatever axis it runs on.
Transformational
Because the goal was never to fit better into the system. It was to build a different one.
Collective, Inclusive, Transformational. That's feminism at full liberating strength, and that's the feminism we're putting to work in business.
This definition and this focus of feminism is for the woman in tears, and for everyone who’s come after her, still waiting to be included in a feminism actually built for them.
For all of us. For flourishing.
WHAT’S NEXT
Flourishing Feminism isn’t a philosophy to admire from a distance. It’s something you build, in how you price, hire, govern, and grow. Here’s where to go next:
See it in practice.
The Feminist Business Model Canvas™ turns these ideas into a tool you can actually use.
Go deeper on the thinking.
Three decades of writing on feminism, business, and what it means to build differently.
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