Abstract
Beginning in the 1990s, large corporations, foundations, and international institutions like the United Nations began promoting the idea that investing in women and girls in developing countries held the potential to lift them, their families, and their countries out of poverty. New research had shown that when poor women controlled the family’s income, they were more likely than men to spend it on their children’s nutrition, education, and health care and thereby increase a country’s human capital. After decades of development programs that ignored this half of the population, this newfound focus seemed to promise new opportunities for women around the world to receive education, job training, higher status, and greater power in their families and communities. At first glance, it also appeared consistent with feminists’ longstanding calls for the global advancement of women’s rights and gender equality. This is real progress, right? Not so fast, argues Kathryn Moeller in her excellent new book, The Gender Effect: Capitalism, Feminism, and the Corporate Politics of Development.
Using her ethnographic case study of the Nike Foundation’s Girl Effect initiative as an example, Moeller cogently argues that this kind of corporate-led campaign, rather than promoting women’s rights or reducing gender inequality, ends up benefiting corporations at the expense of women in the Global South. She shows that these campaigns are often initiated as a way for corporations to create a new socially responsible corporate image in the face of public relations crises, like the one Nike experienced after revelations about sweatshops came to light in the early 1990s. Secondarily, such campaigns are justified to shareholders as a way to ensure market expansion by remaking these women and girls as potential future consumers, thereby generating long-term economic growth and increased profits. The problem with this neoliberal market approach to poverty alleviation, as Moeller sees it, is that this discourse conceptualizes women first and foremost as a means for economic growth, and in the process depoliticizes demands that governments, businesses, and international development regimes redistribute resources and opportunities more equitably. Instead of understanding poverty alleviation as an issue of social justice and these women as bearers of human rights, in practice this approach places the responsibility for alleviating poverty squarely on the shoulders of poor women and girls. And in the process, corporatized development campaigns obscure, and often exacerbate, the exploitation these women currently experience at the hands of global corporations (e.g., low wages, unsafe working conditions, discriminatory hiring practices, and sexual violence, to name just a few).
Besides the book’s overall critique of corporatized development strategies, there are several supporting analyses in this book that will be of interest to social scientists. There is a fascinating description of how corporations use global forums, such as the Clinton Girl Initiative or the World Economic Forum, as a protected stage on which to showcase their corporate benevolence and rewrite their narratives. The primary audience for this performance is other members of the global elite (upper echelons of the corporate, political, philanthropic, and celebrity worlds), and the result is to amplify the corporate version of events over other, countervailing voices. The author also examines the underlying image of the adolescent Third World girl who is the target of these development initiatives, and highlights the gendered, racialized, and classed character of this representation: She is female, black or brown, heterosexual but not pregnant, poor but not too poor, and not pursuing post-secondary education or gainfully employed. Besides narrowing the category so much that some NGO grantees cannot recruit enough program participants, the author shows how this representation constructs Third World women as a singular, monolithic category, erasing differences by race, religion, sexuality, class, and geography.
The book includes worthwhile reflections about how social scientific research is pursued as well as descriptions of how NGOs work with these large-scale development initiatives. After giving an informative history of corporatized development campaigns, the author reflects on the challenges of her role as an ethnographer in and of the global apparatus of power constituted by the corporatized development regime. In another section, she analyzes how knowledge about the purported potential for girls to end poverty is funded, produced, and distributed by corporate monitoring and evaluation programs. And by comparing two different Brazilian NGOs that received funding from the Girl Effect campaign, she illustrates ways in which NGOs negotiate their collaborations with corporate development initiatives in a context of unequal resources and power, and the limits to the corporate strategy’s ability to truly transform the lives of the women and girls they claim to serve.
This book is very well written and will be a thought-provoking read for educated laypersons as well as scholars, graduate students, and advanced undergraduates interested in international development, poverty, and gender.