Feminist movements need corporate partners willing to challenge the systems they profit from

2025 marked 30 years since world leaders and feminist movements established a landmark agreement in gender justice policy: the Beijing Platform for Action. It was a rallying cry that women’s rights are human rights.

But while we owe much to the feminist elders who shaped this vision, the Platform failed to reckon with the role of corporate power in shaping the realities facing women and gender diverse people. It asked too little of business and left systems intact that continue to deepen inequality.

UN Women and other UN bodies are increasingly engaging the private sector through tools such as the Women’s Empowerment Principles, gender-responsive procurement, and growing expectations around human rights due diligence in global supply chains.

Yet, movements have critiqued some of these approaches, and these developments sharpen, rather than resolve, a central tension: whether engagement with business can move beyond voluntary commitments to address the structural economic injustices that the Beijing Platform left largely intact.

This is why today feminist movements are still pressing for enforceable accountability for how private sector power shapes gendered injustice. And as the year ends, current debates are centred on how to accelerate progress in the face of deepening inequality, multiple crises, and rising fascisms.

In this complex picture, how might companies push beyond the limitations of the Beijing Declaration? In the year ahead, will they be willing to challenge the systems they profit from, and which keep gender gaps open?

Promises and silences: women and the economy

The Beijing Platform names “Women and the Economy” as a key area and lays the foundation for “empowerment lite.” It frames women’s access to jobs and markets as liberation, but it fails to ask whether those markets are designed to liberate. It assigns responsibilities to governments and includes civil society as a supporting actor, but is largely silent on the private sector. This is a critical omission.

The Beijing Platform overlooks how corporate power shapes economic systems that impact women and gender-diverse people. It reduces gender justice to boardroom representation rather than challenging systemic exploitation such as how terms of trade do not favour women farmers;  gendered harassment as part of union-busting in supply chains dependent on women’s labour; and how women are more likely to lose jobs when a company downsizes and workers are laid off.

“Girl Boss feminism”

The Beijing Platform emphasises women’s representation in corporate leadership, and this has become the centrepiece of what is popularly called “Girl Boss feminism,” an agenda that equates empowerment with individual success and upward mobility. Law firms have established quotas for having more women partners, and certain governments have mandated a specific number of women in boardrooms. While the intent behind these moves should be lauded, it often benefits women who are already privileged, and does not necessarily translate into better treatment of women at work on the factory floor.

As feminists have long argued, putting new faces in positions of power doesn’t necessarily change the mechanics that sustain exploitation.

Let’s take garment supply chains for example: even if we had women represented at the C-suite level of fashion companies, this does not equate to gender justice if purchasing practices and business models are still rigged against workers’ rights on the factory floor, the majority of whom are women (nearly 60% worldwide).

There are numerous reports that demonstrate how corporate purchasing practices in the garment industry reproduces precarity and gender-based violence, from factories in Lesotho to India. While garment workers make poverty wages, the company’s CEO makes millions and shareholders of these very same companies get paid generous dividends. It is clear whom the business model is skewed to favour.

From supply chains to app-based gig work in the digitalised economy, inclusion without transformation is not justice. When women are absorbed into systems that remain exploitative, unaccountable, and women remain underpaid, they are not being empowered, they are being used.

It is not enough to call for women and gender diverse people to be at the table. We need to go further and ask: who built the table, who owns it, who sets the agenda, and who profits from the outcomes. Rather than replace one system of exploitation with another, we need new models for equity and empowerment.

Flawed financing: entrepreneurship and microcredit

The Beijing Platform for Action promotes microcredit and boosting women’s entrepreneurship as key strategies for economic inclusion.

While the Grameen Bank model from Bangladesh is often praised for empowering women through microcredit, research shows that many women take on debt without gaining meaningful control over the funds or decision-making power in their households or communities. This is why feminist economists and others have consistently critiqued these models for shifting the burden of development onto individual women, while ignoring the structural forces that create and sustain poverty. 

In a world where billionaires exist, expecting women to lift themselves and their families out of poverty through microloans alone places an outsized burden on those with the least, while letting structural inequality off the hook. Instead of rewarding hard work with living wages and systemic redistribution of resources across society, what’s being offered is a drop in the ocean. 

This is why even back in 1995, the indigenous women’s movement criticised the Beijing Platform for Action for how it had depoliticised the economic justice agenda by failing to confront the root causes of inequalities.

Today, these critiques remain as important as ever.

The unfinished business of Beijing

Rather than ushering in a more equitable world, we’ve seen an unprecedented consolidation of wealth and power among a small global elite with global inequality soaring to record levels.

By any yardstick, women earn less, are paid less even if they do the same amount of work as men do. Women have fewer opportunities to rise up the corporate ladder, are more likely not to return to work after childbirth, are less likely to get plum assignments often born out of a misconceived notion that women have family responsibilities (as if men don’t), and in the corporate world, are often assigned to support roles. There has indeed been a lot of improvement, and there are more women in middle management, and some are chief executive officers too, but the model of business through its incentive structures has not changed fundamentally.

This is why the next chapter of gender justice has to be beyond the boardroom, and focus on demanding accountability, redistribution and repair. Initiatives that point in this direction include the global call by feminists and social movements for binding rules for companies and for alternative economies founded on care, human rights and environmental justice.

Companies can be powerful allies to feminist movements. This means confronting inequality in their own operations, addressing gender-based violence in supply chains, and shifting power to women and marginalised workers. Especially in this current moment with attacks on gender justice, feminist movements need corporate partners willing to challenge the systems they profit from and commit to structural change.

Thirty years after Beijing, the lesson is clear: voluntary commitments, leadership pledges, and representation alone cannot deliver justice. If engagement with business is to be meaningful, it must confront how corporate power is exercised through business models, purchasing practices, and labour relations. The unfinished business of the Beijing Platform for Action is not simply about closing gender gaps, but about dismantling the economic structures that keep them open. Advancing women’s rights now demands binding standards, enforceable human rights due diligence, and corporate actors willing to move beyond symbolism to redistribution, accountability, and repair.