Capitalism & Feminism

This session took on the girlboss and her discontents. We wanted to understand how feminism gets sold back to us as a brand, a t-shirt slogan, a seat at the boardroom table, and what gets lost in that transaction. We moved from the tax code to Silvia Federici to trad wife TikTok, and kept landing on the same tension: is the problem patriarchy borrowing capitalism’s tools, or capitalism requiring patriarchy to function at all? We didn’t fully resolve it, but we got a lot clearer on what’s actually being asked when someone tells you to lean in. We also looked at communist countries and how communism, so far, has resulted in a double burden for women without resolving the underlying problems.

1. Definitions first
   • Neoliberalism: minimal government, private property, free competition, personal responsibility
   • Purple capitalism / feminist capitalism: a critical term for feminism that stops at more women in the C-suite
   • Neoconservatism: the pull back toward traditional family roles, often religiously grounded
   • Commodity activism and pinkwashing: "my boyfriend is a feminist" t-shirts, breast cancer ribbons on products that don't help
2. The tax gap
   • Joint household taxation quietly punishes the lower earner, usually the woman, for wanting to work more
   • VAT on period products, despite periods not being a lifestyle choice
   • The pink tax is real and measurable: roughly 2.3% of products cost more for women versus 1.4% more for men, something the EU has been aware of since 2004 with no current plans to act
3. The gender employment gap
   • We compared notes on whether we'd seen this play out in our own families
   • The EU gap sits at 10.8 percentage points, down only 1.9 points in ten years
   • Care responsibilities are the EU's own explanation, which says a lot about who is expected to provide that care
   • Why this matters beyond the paycheck: work is tied up with identity, not just income
4. The gender pay gap
   • EU27 stood at 13.0% in 2020, down only 2.8 points since 2010
   • EU targets set in 2002 for childcare coverage (33% for under-3s, 90% from age 3) prompted us to compare our own childhoods and, for some of us, our own parenting
   • The "cleaned" pay gap hides as much as it reveals: three in ten women work in education, health, or social care (low-paid) against 8% of men, while almost a third of men work in STEM against 7% of women
   • Belgian time-use data made it concrete: of 1,440 minutes a day, women spend 237 on unpaid work versus 144 for men, with the gap mirrored in leisure and personal care
   • We wondered aloud whether being socialised into unpaid work at home is also why women volunteer more, tying back to the 1970s antigirlboss podcast
5. Girlboss feminism as a proposed fix
   • Personal stories of running into "just work harder" as advice, and how hollow it started to feel
   • The core promise: anything is possible if you hustle enough, with ambition rebranded as feminism itself
   • White women's empowerment, packaged and sold, with an image of inclusion that rarely extends behind the scenes
   • The "girl" in girlboss doing quiet work of its own: a sexist Trojan horse making ambition more palatable by infantilising it
6. Looking for the deeper cause
   • Federici's Caliban and the Witch: women assigned to reproduce labour power for capitalism, with production and reproduction split apart and enforced through violence, including the witch trials
   • Today that unpaid labour is so normalised it no longer reads as threatening; we discussed the "childless cat lady" as capitalism's newer scapegoat, and where that rhetoric has surfaced recently
   • Equality versus equity: capitalism asks the same of everyone regardless of starting point, communism at least claimed to aim for equity
   • A Marx quote on the "position of the fair sex" as a measure of social progress, which we picked apart rather than took at face value
   • Lise Vogel's critique that socialist movements historically didn't dig deep enough into the roots of women's oppression to actually liberate women
   • A Polish woman's account: life under communism was arguably better than now in some respects, but came with its own "double burden" of paid work stacked on unpaid labour, which we debated as still recognisable today
   • From the Nature paper: neoliberalism sells women's economic independence as success, reframes family policy as a matter of national competitiveness, and produces "communicative capitalism," where wearing a slogan on a t-shirt feels like political action without being one
   • Gender is one axis among several — age, race, and immigration status all feed capital accumulation too
   • And it traces back to land and ownership: private patriarchy inside the household gave way to a "capitalist patriarchy" operating in both public and private life
7. Pop culture reproducing the pattern
   • Trad wife content as a reactionary answer to girlboss burnout
   • "Soft life" and "quiet quitting" read the same way: not a rejection of the system, but exhaustion with performing inside it
8. Our conclusion
   • A theme that keeps recurring across our sessions: structural problems get repackaged as individual responsibility
   • Following the Nature paper, we agreed the women's movement needs to name patriarchal power dynamics and the economic structures underneath them, not one or the other
9. Further reading:
   • For anyone who wants to sit longer with the historical thread on unpaid labour and the double burden we kept circling back to:
   • Silvia Federici — Caliban and the Witch
   • Silvia Federici — Revolution at Point Zero
   • Slavenka Drakulić — How We Survived Communism and Even Laughed