The world needs more business executives and CEOs who are women. But it also needs more executives who are fiercely feminist.
Most corporate executives are men. In fact, only around 4% of CEOs in the Fortune 500 are women.
That’s something that is quite unfortunate.
No, actually it isn’t just unfortunate. It’s ridiculous – pure and simple.
It’s time to break the status quo
It’s a sad state of affairs because business executives, as a collective group in society, wield immense sociopolitical and cultural power. Compared to most people in Western society, corporate executives command a paramount position of political influence and authority. There’s a reason, after all, why CEOs from Apple, Microsoft, and other global tech forces met with Trump last month.
It’s time to change the patriarchal world order
As a result of their sociopolitical clout, corporate execs can either upend the existing social order – or mercilessly perpetuate the current patriarchal world order. Executives exercise varying degrees of sociopolitical power every time they make the decision (or influence corporate boards to make the decision) to increase or decrease the price of a given product.
Every time they make hiring decisions and layoffs; every time they make decisions on what suppliers to subcontract. Every time they choose how to distribute corporate profits; every time they champion their political beliefs in the media, through lobbying efforts – and so on.
In short, to a large extent, corporations rule the world – and since executives act as corporate agents, executives continually exercise great sociopolitical power.
It’s time for more women to become business executives
But most business executives are men.
So we need more women executives on the top rungs of the corporate ladder, right?
Yes. Yes, we do.
But we must go one step further, and emphasize that society needs more feminist executives. And not just executives who are “casually feminist,” but executives who are unapologetically, unashamedly, stridently feminist.
What happens when we have waaay more corporate execs who are unstoppable feminists?
Quite a lot ends up happening, actually.
It’s time for feminist executives to step up
For starters, more feminist executives means more time for women in business to actually get stuff done instead of getting sexually harassed by male coworkers and male executives on a rampant basis.
More feminist executives means more feminist corporations which exert a formidable feminist influence on policy and legislation – nationally and internationally.
More feminist executives means more mutual collaboration among feminists in positions of corporate power. Because – let’s face it – there’s plenty of collaboration that goes on between distinctly anti-feminist and/or oblivious male executives, who make mutual decisions that continue to replicate a male-dominated society.
More feminist executives means more women who can boldly apply various feminist frameworks (whether liberal or socialist or transnational, and so on) to the world at large – wherever their corporation intersects with politics, society, culture, and issues of human rights.
It means more actual leverage in the hands of women who are willing to disrupt and alter the patriarchal status quo wherever it is found – in marriage, in property ownership, immigration laws, procreation, in labor, and on and on.
All this creates a more feminist world order.
It’s time to change the world
And – scratching the surface, here – that’s why the world needs more corporate executives who aren’t only women but also staunch and fierce feminists.
Because more feminist executives means more ammunition in the struggle for equal citizenship, for equal humanity.
And because – through the power of female-led corporate muscle – more feminist executives means more flipping off of the whole patriarchy.
Leave your thoughts in the comments!
Emily Lyons is the founder and CEO of North Americas top event staffing agency. With Emily at the helm, what started as a small agency has exploded like firecrackers across the entertainment scene in Canada and The United States. Emily’s hustling has won over big names like Warner Bros., MAXIM, UFC, Justin Bieber, Drake, and Lamborghini. Named “Canada’s Top Agency” by Forbes.com. Read her interview on LadyBossBlogger here.