One of the understudied challenges facing the field of business ethics and corporate social responsibility (CSR) is the extent to which we, as teachers and researchers, have contributed to the widespread use of CSR for corporate branding and what we might call “responsibility washing.” This book provides an excellent opportunity to recognize this trend and confront our own complicity. In The Gender Effect, Kathryn Moeller provides a clear-eyed assessment of a Nike Foundation initiative to fund economic empowerment programs for adolescent girls. The initiative was launched in 2008 to help Nike change its reputation from an exploitive multinational corporation building wealth for investors on the backs of women and girls struggling in poorly paid and unsafe work conditions to a corporation passionate about the education and economic empowerment of girls across the Global South.

When major corporations announce campaigns to empower poor girls and women around the world, what are their real goals? What are those girls and women subsequently empowered to do? Who benefits? At what cost? How are the power dynamics altered or reproduced? What are the long-term prospects for the girls? Are the systems that have distributed massive wealth to a few, and scrawny economic benefits to most everyone else, challenged or reinforced? Whose responsibility is it to tackle the interlocking practices of gender, race, and class oppression that are readily visible in the supply chains of North America’s biggest retail operations? Moeller addresses these questions as she follows the Nike Foundation’s focus on adolescent girls from The Girl Effect’s early conception in 2005, through its launch in 2008, to its spin-off into an independent organization in 2015. Over these ten years, Nike, Inc. invested over $100 million and gained over $70 million from other foundations to support this branded theory of social change.

Using a participant-observer ethnographic approach, Moeller collected data on international NGOs and corporate foundation initiatives focused on women and girls. While doing so, she also served as a cultural and linguistic translator so as to be contributing rather than just occupying space in the offices, hallways, and meeting rooms where she observed. Moeller fully acknowledges her own position of privilege as an educated, white American woman visiting communities in the Global South. White upper-middle-class women have been the main beneficiaries of liberal feminism, not only since the 1960s, but for centuries prior as well. It is incumbent on us to acknowledge our privilege in benefitting from these inequitable distributions of power, and Moeller does so explicitly. Educated women researchers are in positions of power relative to women in emerging economies, targeted by corporate marketers and philanthrocapitalists. These girls and women were not Moeller’s research subjects; rather, she was studying the initiatives and programs designed to bring them into the supply-chain stream. Nonetheless, she worked to gain their trust and candor in order to observe, hear, and accurately convey their experiences and perspectives.

A significant strength of this book is its thoroughly documented research sources. A few pseudonyms are used to protect the identities of NGO administrators and funding recipients, but the identities of executives, media personalities, conference speakers, politicians, and celebrities who have thrown their weight behind the various campaigns for girls are frequently visible. For the introduction alone Moeller includes 180 endnotes, citing critical scholars on race, gender, and colonialism, development policy experts, corporate reports, UN reports, and a wide range of other sources. These provide worthwhile detours for anyone doing related research. A figure conveying the complex working relationships between corporations (e.g., Nike, Walmart, Coca-Cola, H&M, and three dozen more) and NGOs (e.g., the Clinton Global Initiative, the World Economic Forum, the Third Billion Campaign, and a dozen others) resembles the mapped flight routes of United Airlines. These relationships turn out to be a significant part of the story: the achievement of collaborative relationships enables increased visibility, endorsements, branding, investment magnets, and marketing opportunities, all leading ultimately to increased social legitimacy and growth for the corporations championing these projects. The empowerment projects once measured and assessed for corporate messaging, and the girls themselves, less vital to the overall goals, are frequently jettisoned after the photo opportunities have been exploited, the campaign has peaked, and interest has passed.

Moeller begins her story of the Nike Foundation’s focus on adolescent girls with the anxious proposal of Maria Eitel, Nike’s first vice president of corporate responsibility, to a skeptical board of trustees in 2004. Despite hesitation and doubt CEO Phil Knight gave it the green light. Moeller addresses the questions of who gains and at whose expense by following the arc of promotion, funding, assessment, and use of the data through Nike’s disengagement with The Girl Effect project in 2015. Laying the groundwork for examining this particular campaign, Moeller uses the introduction to discuss corporatized development, noting historic philanthropy that emerged from corporate success. Her argument is that such philanthropy rests on the production of inequality:

Moeller uses the term “racialized” frequently to highlight the fact that although race is never mentioned by Nike and other funders as part of their criteria for selecting grantees, all of the women and girls they are targeting are brown or black. Their race is part of the implicit message to white investors that women of color will take on the burden of saving their families and their communities, and strengthening the economies of their countries, if the educated and wealthy elite choose to empower them. The racial divide is a significant component of the continuing division of power.

In chapter 1, Nike’s Girl Effect is descriptively located in the context of philanthropic and developmental initiatives that extend the global reach and influence of the corporate donor. It achieves this reach through meticulous research, partnering with nonprofits and consulting firms to gather data on girls’ achievements, barriers to education, dominant social narratives, cultural institutions, and local economic practices through which their target populations move. This Girl Effect is designed to be an apparatus of global power. Such power is multifaceted: it gives the corporation access to markets for its brand, and labor markets for its supply chains. In less obvious ways, it also gives the corporation significant power over girls’ and women’s bodies and lives. As Nike offers funding, it can effectively dictate the kinds of initiatives it is willing to support: advocating for education, selectively supporting family planning messages, small business guidance, creating local employment. While these may seem innocuous and entirely appropriate, they continue a long-established pattern of economic colonization and control over the lives of girls and women in emerging economies to serve the goals of corporate interests.

Throughout the remaining chapters, Moeller examines the historic rise of the idea that investing in poor, racialized girls and women is an outstanding economic decision, essentially “the next billion,” waiting to be brought into the market and empowered to save their families and thereby the world. The idea that investing in women’s economic development results in healthier communities and stronger families was popularized by the Grameen Bank’s microcredit program. The argument has been repeated by numerous girl-supporting organizations, including the Clinton Global Initiative and Nike, despite lack of concrete evidence. It has contributed to the successful “Spectacle of Empowering Girls and Women” (92–119), a trend Moeller discusses in detail as one more way that corporations and NGOs exploit their targets. By advertising their benevolence toward girls at the far end of the race, class, and gender disadvantage spectrum, Walmart, ExxonMobil, Goldman Sachs, and Nike, among others, are able “to secure their hegemony by incorporating and neutralizing critiques of their business practices in order to continue generating unprecedented wealth creation” (118).

Needing to demonstrate the effectiveness of its Girl Effect programs in order to attract venture capital and collaborative investments, Nike developed monitoring and evaluation tools to gather the data they desired to report. When Moeller raised questions with her NGO interviewees about the extent to which the desired outcomes and messages drove the data gathering, she was rebuffed by a funding recipient who pointed out that her job and sustenance were at stake in deciding whether to be appreciative or critical of Nike’s carefully crafted research methods. Thus, the power relationship between the corporate funder and the dependent grassroots organization is reproduced and remains intact. The philanthropy is not actually empowering girls, but rather entrenching the systemic divisions of privilege, wealth, and social control between North and South, white and non-white, Western corporate power and the distant voiceless poor.

In the end, Nike spun the Girl Effect off into an independent organization, moving on to a new set of priorities and target markets. The girls and their programs became expendable, demonstrating their passing value to the corporate world.

What about the positive outcomes of such corporate initiatives? Does Moeller address those as well? No, praise for Nike is not one of the themes of this book. Other writers have made efforts to tell the good news of Nike’s labor practices (e.g., Hartman and Werhane Reference Hartman and Werhane2009) in case studies and business ethics texts. The Gender Effect tells the story of how adolescent girls of color became a new frontier for profit.

So, who is responsible, asks Moeller, for how these girls and women are briefly used? Should progressive feminists speak out about this version of exploitation, or should they work to secure a stronger corporate commitment to the economic empowerment of girls? Can we hope to move beyond the “business case” for collaborative investment and recognize the rights of girls and women to be empowered for their own sake? As the influence of global capital expands, will gender and race continue to determine precarity?

Several times in reading The Gender Effect, I had to put it aside to take a long walk alone, trying to dissipate the feelings of angst that came with these difficult questions. Our field often seems willing to entertain “the business case” as a valid ethical approach, as if business success is a normative goal. For example, a popular research topic for a startling number of articles published in business ethics journals is whether putting women on boards of directors results in improved profits or return on investment. We rarely ask the ethical questions that challenge corporate systems and scrutinize the exploitation of corporate production or messaging. Even less often do we push past the do-good efforts of CSR and philanthropy to say, “that’s not enough,” or “that reinforces systemic and long-term harm.” Like Nike, we want to tell the stories of our own effectiveness as preachers of business ethics. We are ready to champion “the positives” of corporate initiatives without calling them out for the power or narrative grabs that they often are. If we are serious about business ethics, we need to recognize and challenge exploitation, even if it means admitting that the language of social responsibility has been hijacked to hide corporate abuse. Our work in research and teaching must acknowledge that global corporate power requires ongoing critical assessment, rather than blind acceptance of what is asserted to be socially responsible.