The World Economic Forum predicts that it will take more than a century to close the gender pay gap globally, while accountancy firm PwC suggests that today's 21 year olds are unlikely to see the gap close fully during their working lives. Professor Laura Spence's groundbreaking new Academy of Management Review article, "Feminist Value Creation: The Pursuit of Gender Equality" argues that making progress faster will require a comprehensive, even radical, challenge to the most fundamental assumptions in business and management theory: how we define and create value.
With co-authors Genevieve LeBaron, Andrew Crane, Vivek Soundararajan and Michael Bloomfield, she makes the case that if society truly values gender equality, we must adopt a feminist model of value creation that incorporates social reproduction, that is, women's unpaid work to sustain workforces and society, in its understanding of the value that a business creates.
This will mean moving from measuring only the financial outcomes that take place within an organisation's physical or digital presence, to one that recognises, assesses and includes a social and economic valuation of a broader range of activities and outcomes.
Feminist value creation in practice
The paper sets out clear steps that firms can take as they seek to transition from traditional value creation to Feminist Value Creation. Professor Spence suggests that this process should start with recognising the important contributions that caring and domestic work plays in facilitating their operations. This could begin with an assessment or audit to measure how much time their workforce is spending doing unpaid caring and domestic work, or how much it costs them to pay others to support them.
Equipped with this understanding, firms would then be able to mitigate the tensions between their workforce's caring and domestic responsibilities and their ability to do financially productive work. This could include:
- providing childcare on site or covering the cost of daycare elsewhere and at a rate that allows fair pay and working conditions for those performing the work
- offering schedules and working arrangements that allow workers to balance their caring and domestic responsibilities with their work and which also incentivise men to take up an equal share of these responsibilities
Gender-responsive budgeting and feminist accounting
The authors also recommend a thorough overhaul of budgeting, reporting and accounting processes. Firms should introduce the gender-responsive budgeting approach now increasingly used in government and public organisations to highlight unequal resource allocation to their own organisation's needs. They could also transform accounting and reporting practices in the same way that the reporting of environmental and other social impacts has been systematised; using economic metrics where they are reliable and alternative metrics where appropriate.
Changing the workplace's male-dominated culture
Finally, the authors call for a transformation of culture to challenge patriarchal norms and complement, reinforce and build on the material changes being made. Amplified by those in positions in power, this would include addressing the emotional resistance and push back to cultural change through the careful, consistent and sustained reinforcement of interventions designed to shift gendered stereotypes through language, voice and symbols. This includes the robust inclusion of marginalised voices, addressing power differentials head on and cultivating a culture of mutual care and support.
Every year the UK's gender pay gap reporting highlights the painfully slow progress we are making towards gender equality in the workplace. If we want to achieve equality within the working lives of today's school leavers, we need to challenge the idea that caring responsibilities are an inconvenience to be dealt with at the margins and understand their centrality to workers' lives and ability to create other kinds of value. A feminist model of value creation will do just that.
Laura Spence, Professor of Business Ethics & Sustainability
The Academy of Management Review is renowned in the field of business and management studies as the source of the most incisive and influential scholarship that over time becomes accepted practice. It is enormously exciting to have a paper calling for a fundamental rethink of what we perceive as the value that businesses create published in such a respected and influential journal.
Professor Paul Mizen, Vice Dean of Research, King's Business School
Notes
PWC's 2024 report Mandatory UK Gender Pay Gap Reporting predicted that it is unlikely that today's new graduates will see the gender pay gap disappear during their working lives, while the World Economic Forum estimates that closing the gender pay gap globally will take at least a century.
