PathMinding: Get Aligned + Accountable in Your Feminist Business (2 Sessions) Monday, February 1, 2021 1:00 PM Central Time – 2:30 PM Central Time Monday, February 8, 2021 1:00 PM Central Time- 2:30 PM Central Time How can we hold
We stand in solidarity with the Black community and #BlackLivesMatter. The murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, David McAtee, Tony McDade, and Rayshard Brooks reflect the institutionalized, structural racism that we have yet to truly address as a
On January 9th, CV Harquail will present her Feminist Business Model Canvas at the monthly meeting of the Strongly Sustainable Business Model Group in partnership with OCAD U and sLab. Learn more. Hosted by Antony Upward, this group meets on
Join journalist Kimberly Seals Allers, author of The Big Letdown: How Medicine, Big Business, and Feminism Undermine BreastFeeding, and Lex Schroeder, Co-Founder of Feminists at Work, for a frank discussion on pushing feminism forward — exploring race, class, sexual orientation,
The only way to really change Uber for the better is to aim at the root causes of Uber’s toxic culture. That means changing Uber’s emphasis from domination to collaboration, from extraction to contribution, and from selfishness to collective gain. The only way to fix the rot at Uber’s core is for Uber to become not merely a less sexist company, but rather a feminist company.
Women’s ideas and leadership have been systematically erased for centuries. We know this. So it’s good to make sure this doesn’t happen as a rule. It’s not about helping women get ahead (although that’s important). It’s not even about money (although sometimes it totally is and women need to get paid for their work). It’s about showing another human being and their intellectual work respect.
Businesses can be effective, profitable, and feminist all at the same time. It’s true! But the great majority of our business development tools (as they exist now) reinforce patriarchal models of thinking and operating by design. Given the way women’s and feminists’ ideas have been left out of history (and business and management thinking), particularly those ideas from women of color, how could our current tools possibly help lead us to the future of work? New tools for feminist business practice like the FBMC design these considerations back into your business. They work on social and expressive solutions right alongside functional product/service solutions. They center foundational strengths, collective values, and social/political/economic impact right alongside revenue streams. They value care for relationships, justice, and social equity. They ask questions of entrepreneurs about how to meet customer, community, and stakeholder social needs while contributing to community wellness.
When it is clear that everyone has something to contribute to the women’s leadership field (or any field, for that matter), historically marginalized groups aren’t just “included” in existing, dominant systems and previous ways of doing things; their knowledge is understood to be essential to the health of the whole. Young people’s contributions are also more valued. The contributions of people who work 10 or 25 hours per week are valued as much as people who work 80 hours per week. Why? Information and knowledge are what count.
We know that gender bias takes a personal and economic toll on individuals. But gender bias has collective negative effects which mostly get ignored. Too many good ideas with the potential to move communities, organizations, entire fields forward get lost simply because they happen to come from women. Too many good ideas only get heard when they are picked up by men (who don’t always give women colleagues credit) and much gets lost in translation. All of this is compounded by race and class.
If we know this happens, one outcome is that we struggle to follow a woman’s lead when it comes to doing things differently. We struggle to move from knowledge to practice and to women-led practice.
The Feminist Lean Project Canvas (FLPM) is a tool to help any leader craft and develop the scope of a work project so that:
(1) You can develop collaborative #PowerWITH other stakeholders, so that your project is co-created, supported, and executed by an aligned team of interested parties, and
(2) The work project itself incorporates an explicitly feminist point of view and considers how justice, equity, and system change can be added into the design of your everyday work.
