Worldwide Girls’s Day, marked every year on March 8, is all about celebrating girls and furthering efforts in direction of gender equality. Firms are eager to affix these conversations and shout about their achievements on a day when minds are targeted on feminine empowerment. However this has led to accusations of hypocrisy.
In 2021, one consumer on X created the Gender Pay Hole bot. Till 2023,this automated account reposted firms’ supportive messages about Worldwide Girls’s Day, quoting details about their gender pay hole. The bot’s posts obtained tens of 1000’s of views and shares, displaying an urge for food for calling out deceptive company claims about girls’s empowerment.
Activists and researchers label these deceptive actions “gender washing”. It describes communications and practices that current companies as taking motion on gender inequalities at the same time as they have interaction in issues which may be dangerous to girls and ladies.
Gender washing takes many kinds. It may be, for instance, sponsoring ladies’ schooling programmes with out addressing identified practices of kid labour and sexual harassment in provide chains. Or it might be making use of for company social duty awards whereas dealing with lawsuits for discrimination in opposition to feminine workers.
Our analysis examines international arms producers, together with Lockheed Martin, Raytheon and Northrop Grumman. It’s estimated that the worldwide arms commerce as a complete was price US$138 billion (£109 billion) in 2022 (the final yr for which knowledge are compiled).
It’s laborious to say how many individuals are killed by these weapons, however at a minimal it numbers within the tens of 1000’s every year. Past this, the after-effects of weapons use embody displacement, hunger and well being emergencies, as has been seen in Yemen.
Arms producers proceed to provide and promote weapons that trigger untold struggling (together with to girls) the world over. However curiously, arms producers additionally challenge communications celebrating Worldwide Girls’s Day.
Careers in science and tech
The place earlier analysis highlights how gender washing reveals companies or their merchandise in a constructive mild, our analysis revealed larger results. We discovered that, by joint communications with governments and militaries, arms producers had been engaged within the technique of gender washing battle itself.
By posting for Worldwide Girls’s Day, these firms painting the applied sciences and company operations of warfare as empowering to girls and ladies. They present girls succeeding in science and know-how careers, and ladies receiving inspirational talks and science schooling, whereas saying nothing about what that science is getting used for.
For instance, Lockheed Martin Center East and Africa shared a video on X displaying a gaggle of feminine engineers on the firm’s innovation centre in Abu Dhabi, UAE. The submit states that the corporate is “dedicated to inspiring the subsequent era of scientists and engineers by real-world #STEM schooling”.
The video reveals a gaggle of ladies sporting conventional Emirati costume in futuristic labs. They’re interacting with touchscreen pictures of helicopters flying over deserts, analyzing a drone and sitting subsequent to magnifying glasses. The soundtrack is like one thing out of a Hollywood motion film.
However the girls don’t communicate for themselves. We’re presupposed to assume that, because of Lockheed Martin, they’re being educated in cutting-edge know-how and empowered to pursue careers in science. They get hands-on expertise utilizing the very navy applied sciences being deployed in lots of components of their area.
Lockheed Martin’s sale of weapons to combatants within the Center East, together with arms offered to Saudi Arabia with devastating penalties for Yemeni girls, is offered as a studying alternative, “inspiring” girls of the Center East into science careers.
For its half, Lockheed Martin stated in its 2023 gender pay hole report that it had closed the wage hole by 12.1% since 2017. It additionally stated its funding in STEM actions helped it to concentrate on a future pipeline of feminine expertise.
We additionally discovered that some companies try to affix progressive conversations with out truly saying something in any respect. We label this “constructive silences”. That is the place firms say nothing of substance on gender points, and don’t reveal any efforts to deal with gender inequalities inside their very own practices. However nonetheless they faucet into conversations about Worldwide Girls’s Day that may improve their reputations.
A submit on X from Lockheed Martin India makes use of Worldwide Girls’s Day hashtags. However there isn’t a clear hyperlink to the accompanying textual content, which doesn’t point out girls particularly. Neither is there any connection to initiatives to deal with gender inequalities. As an alternative it talks about how “an inclusive surroundings” helps workers to “develop progressive options”.
This issues as a result of – by social media – arms producers current applied sciences of battle as a drive for public good. It’s simpler to deflect criticism of the harms created by your merchandise when you’ll be able to level to your efforts supporting girls’s empowerment.
These posts for Worldwide Girls’s Day, and different gender-washing practices, make it simpler for governments to proceed subsidising the arms trade, shopping for and utilizing weaponry, and issuing licenses for the sale of weapons in conflicts throughout the globe. All of the whereas, they offer the impression that the firms producing these weapons are educating and empowering girls and ladies.
This Worldwide Girls’s Day, have a look for your self. Take into consideration which firms are professing care for girls and what harms would possibly they be obscuring.
In an announcement to The Dialog, a spokesman for Lockheed Martin stated: Lockheed Martin’s core enterprise safeguards human rights by advancing cutting-edge applied sciences that assist US and allied defence forces promote deterrence and shield their individuals. We adhere to strict and moral enterprise practices guided by US authorities legal guidelines, rules and insurance policies associated to worldwide navy gross sales and the usage of merchandise offered to worldwide clients. Our firm tradition is collaborative and respectful, which permits all of our workforce members to impactfully contribute to our mission-critical work.
Raytheon and Northrop Grumman had been additionally approached for remark in regards to the claims made on this article, however didn’t reply by the point we revealed.
