The cosmetics brand L’Oréal Paris has teamed up with the advertising group McCann for an ad campaign focusing on gender representation in the corporate sector. Their research indicates that although men dominate the executive hierarchy in numbers, female leaders perform better in terms of profitability, innovation, and employee satisfaction. The campaign combines these statistics with make-up products and uses the headline of “This is an ad for men. Hire more women in leadership roles. We are all worth it.” This ad is an example of popular feminism, which aims to use feminism and women empowerment as marketing tools to seem more relevant to their consumers.
Simply including women does not solve the structural gender problems or challenge the dominant ideology that supports them.
According to Sarah Banet-Weiser, feminism is “popular” in three senses. First of all, it circulates in popular commercial media, which applies for L’Oréal’s ad campaign since it exists on social media platforms and broadcast media.
Secondly, feminism is popular because it is being admired by like-minded groups and it is structured around the dynamic of inclusion and exclusion. In our specific example, the ad focuses on women in leadership roles, which excludes working class women.
Lastly, competing power relations allow some forms of feminism to be more visible than others. For example, celebrity feminism and corporate feminism achieve more visibility compared to critiques of patriarchal structures. The L’Oréal ad is an example of corporate feminism, because it focuses on the fact that women are a minority group in the corporate setting. However, this type of feminism doesn’t challenge the structures that force us to demand men to ‘hire more women’ in the first place. Feminist scholar Joan Scott calls this type of feminism as “add women and stir kind of liberal feminism”. Simply including women does not solve the structural gender problems or challenge the dominant ideology that supports them. In other words, “hiring more women in leadership roles” will not necessarily solve the challenges that women face in the workplace, such as unequal pay, sexual harassment, or glass ceilings.
There is also a strong connection between corporate feminism and capitalism. Popular feminism advocates tend to focus on individual women by inviting them to make changes to their own lives to overcome the struggles that they face regarding gender related inequalities. There is a tendency to use feminism to empower women through consumerism in order to create economically independent subjects who will become potential customers. The L’Oréal campaign differentiates itself by addressing the campaign to men instead of women, which suggests a more structural critique that women might not be able to fix with their individual decisions. However, it still feeds into the same ideologies by emphasizing capitalist success.
It is also worth noting that McCann Worldgroup stated that they directed the ad at men instead of women in order to “add a dose of humor”, which refers to the fact that popular feminism cannot originate from negative feelings. The following statement of Rosalind Gill gives a better context to this phenomenon: “[popular] feminism is encumbered by its desire not to be angry, not to be ‘difficult’, not to be ‘humorless’”. The potential power of this ad as a campaign drawing men into the conversation about gender inequalities is demolished by the statement of the creators. Including men into this conversation should not be considered as ‘humorous’.
In addition, although L’Oréal indicated that the ads were reflecting the company’s core beliefs, ironically, all the members of the McCann team that worked on this campaign were men. All these points highlight how the commercial interests of the company override the will to represent the values of feminism.