ABOUT CV HARQUAIL
I pioneered the field of Feminist Business, and I've spent 35 years making it usable.
I’m a scholar of both business and feminism, a teacher and facilitator, a lifelong feminist activist, and an entrepreneur. I wrote the first book to connect the two and built the tools that put feminist practice into business people’s hands.
WHAT I BELIEVE
Business can be an engine for political, social, and economic change, when we design it to practice feminist principles.
When we build our work, our products, and our companies by practicing the feminism we believe in, we make real social change every day. Feminist practices transform every part of our work and commerce, so that the effort of building a livelihood also builds a better world.
My work is for people who are done choosing between their politics and their livelihood — and are ready to build something that doesn’t require that choice.
WHAT I MEAN BY FEMINISM
When I talk about feminism in business, I mean Flourishing Feminism.
Flourishing Feminism challenges sexism and all oppressions, to create a world where every living thing can flourish. Too many conversations about women and business promote a politically neutered feminism that props up the status quo. My feminism challenges the domination of men over women, and of profit for a few over flourishing for all.
Despite what ‘women’s empowerment’ programs might sell you, there is no individual off-ramp from oppression. There’s no individual path to social, economic, or political flourishing. We need a feminism that has us working with each other, for each other, targeting the roots of oppression and focusing on flourishing for all.
HOW I GOT HERE
For more than three decades, I’ve focused on one question: How can feminists use business as an engine of social change?
My work, and my life’s focus, is connecting feminist thinking and business practice, to make business work for everyone and to put feminism to work as we design businesses, make products, serve customers, and organize how we build our economies together.
Seriously, not to sound old but…
I’ve been formally writing about the interplay between feminism and business since at least 1988, when I wrote my first grad school research paper on “Feminist Businesses, Feminist Politics and Feminist Products.”
And, I’ve been practicing feminism since I was self-aware.
I committed to practicing feminism as I watched my mom struggle to survive in a corporate job as a single parent in the 60s and 70s, while holding feminist gatherings in our suburban living room.
At the same time, I watched my dad build the first of several financially-successful businesses by finding market niches and serving customer needs that others overlooked.
The political and organizational questions my mother was asking and the business challenges my father was facing were as distant from each other as my divorced parents themselves.
Couldn’t a business succeed by doing more than competing? Couldn’t an activist earn a living while practicing her politics? Couldn’t we have businesses and organizations that were effective, innovative, and also not oppressive? Couldn’t we change the world through the businesses we build, and by redesigning the everyday work that gets the job done?
I focused my education on understanding how people can organize together to achieve transformational goals. I majored in political theory. I got involved in the peace movement, and Quaker social justice work. I even reorganized the leadership structure of my college radio station to be less-hierarchical and collectively led.
After college, I meant to get an MBA and start a feminist business of my own to change the world. But first, I invested in a little real-world business experience.
I went undercover in corporate jobs at IBM and Procter & Gamble, selling paper products, managing a production line in a soap factory, and ultimately moving into Organizational Development — the department that tries to make a hyper-capitalist business a little less awful. (Hey, it was a start.)
I discovered I didn’t know enough, and we didn’t know enough – yet – to end oppressive practices at the soap plant and make it a more feminist operation, where people and the company could both thrive. Frustrated by the profound roadblocks built into big corporations by their focus on profits first, I bailed and went to graduate school for a business PhD in organizational change.
I thought surely business school would show me how to bring feminism and business together to make real change. But instead of building positive connections between these worldviews, I found myself challenging the dominant paradigms in both Management and Women’s Studies.
Teaching as a Master’s Candidate in the Women’s Studies Department at the same time I was researching and writing as a PhD student in the Business School, I had no comfortable home.
The feminists thought I was a capitalist sellout and the business school folks thought I was an unrealistic radical.
But I never gave up working to build a connection between these communities. These experiences of simultaneously building theory and recommending new practices in both feminism and business have given my work its depth and edge.
My work belongs in both conversations, feminist theory and business practice, and takes both seriously. That’s what makes it different from everything else you’ve been offered.
MY CREDENTIALS
Education
PhD in Management and Organizations, Ross School of Business, University of Michigan, where I also earned a Master’s Certificate in Women’s Studies.
Teaching
Leadership and Organizational Change to MBAs and executives at the Darden School of Business, University of Virginia; the capstone undergraduate management practicum in Entrepreneurship at Stevens Institute of Technology; courses in race, class, and gender in Michigan’s Women’s Studies department; courses in accelerators and economic development programs; and more than two dozen of my own Feminist Business courses, online and in person.
Research & writing
Award-winning research in journals including Administrative Science Quarterly, Academy of Management Journal, Academy of Management Review, and Organization Studies, plus many book chapters. My book Feminism: A Key Idea for Business and Society (Routledge, 2020) is the first to analyze business from a feminist perspective and propose a Feminist Business praxis.
Building the field
Co-founder of Feminists at Work (a Feminist Business practice consultancy), co-founder and producer of the Entrepreneurial Feminist Forums, and co-founder of the Feminist Enterprise Commons. I designed the Feminist Business Model Canvas™ and launched its online course. I’ve mentored and served on the design team of the Fifth Wave Feminist Business Accelerator, led Feminist Business courses for the Center for Women and Enterprise, and consulted with the Canadian Women’s Foundation‘s Feminist Business Practice initiative.
WHO I’M FOR
For people who want feminism and business
My work is for feminist entrepreneurs who are done with business advice that ignores power, and done with feminist frameworks that ignore business.
I’m looking for:
Business builders who want their products, structures, and everyday operations to go beyond representation and drive genuine transformation.
Business activists who need their processes, customer relationships, and practices to reflect their feminist values, not just fit right into capitalism.
Activist entrepreneurs building businesses organized around mutual support, shared power, and collective flourishing — for workers, customers, suppliers, and communities alike.
Feminist Business practitioners ready to move from aspiration to practice: designing the structure, the pricing, the governance, and the relationships that make feminist values real.
If that’s you, know this: the goal isn’t purity. It’s accountability, and practice, and not losing the thread of why you started. Whatever brought you here, we have the authority to critique and contribute to both business and feminism, and the right to bring them together. If that’s what you’ve been looking for, keep reading.
THE COMMUNITY WE BUILT
I didn't build Feminist Business alone.
My work in feminist business and entrepreneurship accelerated in 2015, when Lex Schroeder and I co-founded Feminists at Work to run feminist business practice workshops in NYC. That same year, I created the Feminist Business Model Canvas™, a tool that let me take years of knowledge about feminism and business and put it directly into entrepreneurs’ hands. In 2016, Petra Kassun-Mutch connected with Lex and me, and together we hosted the very first Feminist Business workshop in Toronto.
That collaboration soon grew into something bigger. Petra, Lex, and I co-founded the Entrepreneurial Feminist Forums, producing two conferences in Toronto, in 2017 and 2018. We brought together a feminist team of conference designers, experts, teachers, facilitators, and entrepreneurs to host a learning experience for more than 250 attendees. The EFFs were the first in-person events to put feminists and entrepreneurs in the same room and on the same agenda, and they kickstarted the North American Feminist Business community.
Within Petra’s LiisBeth Magazine for Feminist Changemakers, we co-created the Feminist Enterprise Commons, where I served as Feminist in Residence. The Commons is now hosted within the Canadian Women’s Chamber of Commerce, where we continue monthly W.I.O.T. meetings, feminist businesspeople Working It Out Together. Along the way, I began working alongside organizations like the Fifth Wave Feminist Accelerator at the Canadian Film Centre, the Center for Women and Enterprise in New England, and the Canadian Women’s Foundation‘s Feminist Entrepreneurship Program.
Since then, I’ve taught more than two dozen of my own feminist business and entrepreneurship courses, online and in person, bringing this work directly to founders wherever they are.
Together with Petra Kassun-Mutch, Lex Schroeder, Dr. Barb Orser, Kelly Diels, Dr. Golnaz Golnaraghi, and Gwen Pokalo Hart, and with feminist entrepreneurs themselves, who are the real engine of all of this, I’ve helped build a hotbed of Feminist Business energy in Toronto and beyond.
GO DEEPER
The Library.
35 years of Feminist Business writing, from foundational arguments to working tools.
The FBMC.
The Feminist Business Model Canvas™ is the one-page design tool for building a business around your values, without sacrificing them.
The Book.
Feminism: A Key Idea for Business and Society, the first book to analyze business from a feminist perspective.
Work with me.
Keynotes, workshops, and curriculum for teams, accelerators, and universities.
THE NEWSLETTER
Think differently about business. Every month.
The Feminist Future of Business is my free monthly letter on putting feminism to work in the businesses we build. Reconsider conventional business advice and explore feminist practices, one insight, tool, and framework at a time.