Resisting Equal Pay Policy Through Problem Manipulation: A Feminist Inquiry into Corporate Political Activity

Abstract This study adopts a feminist perspective to examine corporate political activity (CPA), focusing on a rarely explored case in business ethics research: the involvement of business interest groups and social partners in shaping governmental gender equality policy. The study contributes to feminist scholarship on business–society relations by highlighting a form of CPA in which equal pay policies are resisted through the manipulation of policy problems. It presents a qualitative analysis of an extensive dataset (N = 320) on policy processes related to equal pay legislation in Finland, spanning from 2010 to 2025. The study employs Carol Bacchi’s policy-constructivist lens‘What’s the problem represented to be?’, together with rhetorical analysis. The study builds on and challenges previous research into CPA strategies by demonstrating a discursive strategy of resisting the policy process through manipulating the policy problem. As our contribution, we theorise problem manipulation as a discursive process of modifying problem representations through deliberate use of argumentative language, which carries exclusionary power. We offer three rhetorical tactics—problem diverting, problem reversing, and problem mismatching— to detail how identified problem–solution couplets can be discursively twisted, challenged or silenced to exclude them from the political agenda.