The Sham of "Girl Power" Capitalism

Women are celebrated in global ad campaigns by top apparel and cosmetics brands. But those same companies discriminate and silence the actual women in their workforces.

90% of the world’s top cosmetics and apparel companies are led by men. Approximately 86% of all apparel companies are led by men.

Here’s a list of the top 5 cosmetics and apparel companies in the world and their CEOs:

As you can see, 9 of the 10 CEOs are men. Yet women are slightly more than 50% of the total population. So this is off. Way off.

If you ignored the fact that these industries are designed to cater to women, then women should be represented equally. Given the make-up of purchasers one might think it should skew majority women. But no. There’s just that one gal at Chanel, newly appointed in December, 2021.

Women spend three times more on fashion than men. It is almost exclusively women who purchase cosmetics and skin care. Has the CEO of Estee Lauder, Fabrizio Freda, ever pondered which red lipstick is better for a night out on the town? Matte or gloss?

Despite the obviously inequitable leadership outcomes, these companies are all too eager to run ad campaigns asserting their commitment to and support of women. But what about actually supporting and promoting qualified women into leadership roles?

Just last year, L’Oreal celebrated their 50th anniversary by telling women that “self-worth is a journey not a destination”. Perhaps that’s true but it’s particularly convenient to say to a woman who wants to be CEO but will never get there because she’s a woman: “Dear, just enjoy the journey.”

When I was “promoted” to Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) at Levi’s in 2013 and dared to ask what the increased compensation would be, I was told “zero”. The head of Human Resources at the time added, "You’re getting the best job in the company. Just be grateful.” Most people don’t want to take on more work and more responsibility without more pay.

In March 2021, Nike released an ad campaign celebrating women’s toughness, linking their ability to persevere in life and sport to the challenges of pregnancy, childbirth and motherhood.

And yet…

In 2019, runner and 6-time Olympic gold medal winner Allyson Felix shared her story of discrimination at the hands of Nike’s leadership in a New York Times Op-ed.

In 2017, she was in contract renegotiations with Nike when she decided she wanted to continue her career as a professional athlete, but also add mother to her list of accomplishments. Despite all of her achievements, Nike wanted to pay her 70% less than what they had in the past. She accepted the pay cut but what she couldn’t abide was a clause that punished her for childbirth:

“I asked Nike to contractually guarantee that I wouldn’t be punished if I didn’t perform at my best in the months surrounding childbirth. I wanted to set a new standard. If I, one of Nike’s most widely marketed athletes, couldn’t secure these protections, who could? Nike declined.”

Felix described pressure to return to training and peak performance after giving birth to her daughter by C-section at just 32 weeks due to severe complications from pre-eclampsia, if she wanted to get paid. She said what we women all know to be true:

“If we have children, we risk pay cuts […] during pregnancy and afterward. It’s one example […] where the rules are still mostly made for and by men.”

Beyond the Felix story, Nike was also outed for additional incidents of widespread discrimination against women during this time period.

In 2018, a bombshell New York Times article detailed harassment of women at Nike by male executives. The piece described a boys club led by Trevor Edwards, then Brand President. The piece also implicated then golden child CEO Mark Parker for letting a culture of harassment go unchecked. Outings to restaurants that ended up in strip clubs and a supervisor boasting about the condoms he always carried in his backpack created a culture wherein women felt marginalized and were often passed over for promotions, when the job would go to a “bro” down with the frat house ethos.

Women at Nike had had enough and they put together a report that landed on Parker’s desk. He apologized but also kind of denied it all. Still, the dossier resulted in an “exodus of male executives” as described by the New York Times. The exodus included Trevor Edwards who was widely considered to be the ascendant CEO once Parker retired.

Later that same year in 2019, Mary Cain, a young running prodigy, blew the whistle on Nike’s Oregon Project, led by coach Alberto Salazar. The “project” aimed to train the very best young runners for Olympic glory. Cain was the youngest track and field athlete to qualify for a World Championship Team when she entered the program. In a New York Times video she describes a culture of abuse and humiliation so horrific that it led to suicidal thoughts. The article stated:

“After months of dieting and frustration, Cain found herself choosing between training with the best team in the world, or potentially developing osteoporosis or even infertility. She lost her period for three years and broke five bones. She went from being a once-in-a-generation Olympic hopeful to having suicidal thoughts.”

Cain left the program. Salazar got fired. Then they shut the whole program down.

In the span of eighteen months, three very public examples, splayed front and center in the New York Times, laid bare Nike’s culture of misogyny and disrespect for women.

During this same time, Nike’s revenue continued to grow unabated. It grew 7.5% in 2019.

No one cared about obvious harassment, and in some cases abuse, of women. Why?

Because: “woke capitalism.” All Nike had to do was run ad campaigns for Women’s History Month pretending to actually support women, and consumers ate it up. They lined up to buy the shoes, despite the obvious discrepancy between the way the company actually treated women and their phony celebratory “girl power” advertised image.

Consumers were able to rock their favorite sneakers AND feel good about buying products from a company that claimed to support and celebrate women. The way Nike really treated women didn’t matter at all.

You might ask – are women even interested in rising through the ranks of companies? According to a report done by McKinsey and Glamour Magazine in 2018 called “Shattering the Glass Runway”, yes. Women enter fashion companies at higher rates than men (~70% of entry level employees are women) and express a higher degree of ambition upon starting their careers. According to this study, 70% of women start their careers in fashion with aspirations of becoming executives as compared to 60% of men.

Are women capable enough (I have to ask)?

The answer again is yes. Women are graduating college at higher rates than men (60% vs 40%) and they outnumber men in graduate programs by almost 50%. Women are capable enough and driven enough.

So what happens? Where does it all go wrong?

I’ll tell you what happens, from personal experience.

You may enter a company with great ambition and a willingness to put your head down and do the work. But then, you might come back from maternity leave and have your male boss decide to make your life “easier” by giving you a less demanding job with less travel, as happened to me after my first child in 2000.

My boss at Levi’s told me that he wanted to make things easier for me with a newborn at home. I didn’t view this as him sabotaging my career. The most charitable way to interpret it is that he assumed I was not the primary breadwinner, and I’d probably leave the workforce soon to be a full time mom anyway.

Except, like many women, I was the primary breadwinner. In fact, in my case, also like many women, I was the only breadwinner. Not only did I not want to stay home with kids full time, I couldn’t afford to.

I was mistakenly grateful at the time. But it set me back at least three years in my career trajectory. Men with fewer qualifications and shoddier work product got promoted ahead of me, while I languished in a less prestigious job under the pretense of kindness on the part of my boss.

Upon return from that same maternity leave, after only 8 weeks “off”, I pumped milk in a sample closet with no lock. I sat with my back to the door, hoping no one would barge in to scrounge for a pair of 32x32 501s for an upcoming photo shoot.

Later, after I had a second child, two male executives told me, point blank, I’d never be a Chief Marketing Officer (CMO). I lacked the vision and creativity necessary, they said (it begs the question, had they spoken to each other beforehand? Were they ganging up on me?). What they were really saying was I should be happy with my supporting role.

I wasn’t. I went on to the be the CMO at Levi’s for over 8 years and made Forbes Most Influential CMO List in 2019 and 2020. Those men were wrong. I ignored them and did what they said I’d never be able to do.

But what a lot of women say is they get tired of fighting for what they deserve and they tap out. In a conversation with the authors of the McKinsey/Glamour study, I was told: if you read between the lines of the report, you hear from women — it’s too hard.

It’s too hard to keep getting passed over. It’s too hard to have to be better than your male counterparts to get the same job. It’s too hard to be talked over, and talked down to and told repeatedly you’re just not quite what we need. Over and over again. You may twist yourself in knots to try to be that thing that they say they want, but then they move the goalposts.

Understandably, many women tire of it. So they lean out.

Some of us keep leaning in though. We endure being told we’re too much or not enough; we talk too much or too fast; we’re too quiet and not visible enough, or too loud and overbearing. I got this conflicting feedback over and over again in my 22 ½ years at Levi’s. The reality is we’re too much woman and not enough man.

I accepted it. I adjusted to their whims. Or tried to.

But when I publicly leaned in to being a mother, and spoke up for kids during Covid, I got pushed out the door.

So much for that ad campaign that we ran at Levi’s during Women’s History Month, “I Shape My World.” You can shape it, but not too much.

It’s not just men censoring women and putting them into untenable boxes. Women journalists whose professional identities are built around supporting women in the workplace also tear down women who go against the prescribed “girl power” narrative.

Business reporter Claire Suddath (Bloomberg) intimated I had aligned myself with Nazis for my stance on schools during Covid. And that I was just “pretty out there.” All because I thought public school kids have the same right to an education that rich private school kids have. Pretty crazy stuff!

The working moms of public school kids rely on schools not only to ensure their children are educated, but to ensure that they can work. When I stood up for kids, I also stood up for the women in the workforce who raise them.

No matter. This pro-woman, “hear me roar” reporter was all too happy to declare that the war on women is getting worse without accepting any blame for firing in our direction.

Now, we’re told in the workplace that we have to announce our she/her pronouns. No thank you. That’s what held me back in the first place.

We’re also told that we aren’t actually women, we’re birthing people. No thanks. I don’t want to call more attention to the thing that stalled my career, resulting in lost wages.

Or we are told we can’t actually have control of our reproductive healthcare at all, we can’t make the decision when to have our children. That’s up to the government in some states.

We’re being infringed on from the right and the left. Which way are we supposed to go? We can’t lean in, we can’t lean out. And we can’t go up the ladder, or at least not all the way up.

So what’s the solution?

1. Promote women who deserve it. When they deserve it. Not 5 years after they’ve proven they can do the job. Think about the lost wages of delaying promotions of women for years on end? Even if they are paid equally in comparable jobs to men, if men get promoted faster – they do, on average 18 months faster – the loss in lifetime wages is significant.

2. Make good on your ad campaign promises of supporting women. The ones that you know. The ones that work inside your building, not the ones in your ads. Or at least stop pretending that you do support them through inspirational but false advertising. That would be more honest. I’d respect it more.

3. Give everyone paid parental leave, men and women. Prioritize people as whole human beings with responsibilities both inside and outside of the workplace. And de-stigmatize parenthood in the workplace. Acknowledge it is something that both women and men do so that women aren’t punished for being parents.

4. Let us speak. Don’t dismiss and diminish us because we may have views and personalities that differ from our male counterparts.

5. Stop saying it’s going to take 100 years to get to equal pay and equal opportunity. Just stop it. Do the 4 things above this one and it won’t take near that long.

It’s not hard. Just treat us like capable human beings. Full-throated, fully equal human beings. With voices, and concerns, both in the workplace and beyond.

Just do it.