Corporate Gender Washing and Women's Rights: A Call for Hard Law Approaches

The twenty-first century has seen a surge in corporations portraying themselves as champions of gender equality. Some of the world’s largest corporations seek to persuade publics of their commitment to furthering the feminist cause by sponsoring women’s and girls’ non-governmental organizations, setting up women’s empowerment networks for their employees, or investing in women-led businesses. Yet many of these same corporations still face accusations of gendered human rights abuses in their employment practices and across their global business operations. A small but growing body of academic literature across disciplines has sought to define and identify corporate practices of “gender washing”, a relatively recent term used to describe instances in which corporations engage in misleading corporate social responsibility (CSR) practices in order to give the impression that they are more gender equal or woman-friendly than they really are. However, to date, there has been little analysis from a legal perspective. Current CSR practices are predominantly exercised through voluntary self-regulation, with limited meaningful implementation, as corporations are not legally obligated to address their adverse human rights impacts or violations. Furthermore, while the United Nations Guiding Principles and the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) guidelines do exist to regulate corporate behavior, they remain ineffective as soft-law mechanisms because they fail to impose legal liability for non-compliance. The existing mechanisms are flawed, and there is a need for a hard law approach to addressing corporate violations of women’s rights and gender washing. Our analysis highlights the need for mandatory reporting and mandatory human rights due diligence, reinforced by effective liability mechanisms, to ensure corporate accountability and justice for victims of gendered human rights abuses.