Fight the patriarchy? Get rich! ‘Financial feminism’ as feminist neoliberalism

The ‘financial feminism’ movement invites us to fight patriarchy by ‘believing in the financial equality of women’, increasing our financial literacy, and investing according to principles of sustainability and impact. As author and podcaster Tori Dunlap puts it, ‘the best way to fight the patriarchy? Get rich!’. This article investigates the financial feminist refrain that financial feminism is ‘just feminism applied to finance’. We interrogate its normative ends – financial equality for women – and evaluate its proposed means: targeted investing and increasing financial literacy by and for women. We suggest that, in contrast to neoliberal feminism, as studied by Rottenberg, which represented a neoliberalisation of feminism, the aspiration here is to create a feminised form of neoliberalism. In this model of feminism, the only sphere of action, let alone activism, is the market. It is a feminism that operates within the idea that ‘there is no alternative’ to our current system of financial capital. We problematise these assumptions by arguing that in constraining itself within this logic, financial feminism cannot fulfil its normative goals. The only way to bring feminism to the economic sphere is to insist on the ongoing relevance of collective politics. In other words, rather than eliding the political entirely, any feminism interested in financial equality must eschew economic individualism and include a horizon of the economic as political.