Feminist Value Creation: The Pursuit of Gender Equality

While the importance of promoting greater equality is widely recognized in management theory and practice, it has yet to be built into the core business process of value creation. To date, research on gender equality in management has either taken the dominant model of value creation as given or, from a critical perspective, viewed value creation as fundamentally incompatible with equality. In this paper, we instead develop a new approach to value creation to address gender equality. To do this, we advance a theory of feminist value creation that draws on social reproduction theory located within materialist feminism. We offer a feminist reconceptualization of value creation in terms of the nature of value, its valuation, and underpinning values, such as to successfully integrate within value creation the “private sphere” of socially reproductive work in addition to the “public sphere” of paid and productive work. We also theorize the material and cultural processes of transformation needed to move toward feminist value creation, and the intra-, inter-, and extra-organizational influences that will affect the likelihood of such a transition. We conclude by elaborating on our contributions to research on gender equality in management and value creation.