It’s Time for Feminist Entrepreneurship to Be the Powerhouse It Can Be

When I was younger, I would visit the Toronto Women’s Bookstore just about every week. Every time I entered the homey duplex, I would immediately be drawn to the shelves, the zines and greeting cards, and the buttons, socks and magnets I couldn’t find anywhere else.

bell hooks, Zadie Smith, Audre Lorde, Naomi Klein… I didn’t have much money, but I clutched these authors’ books and carried them to the cash register.

“I love this one,” the employee would tell me with a grin, assuring me I’d cherish my choice.

They were right. Two decades later, I still love these books.

Feminist Businesses in Canada

The storied roots of the Toronto Women’s Bookstore stretch to the 1970s — like other women’s bookstores in Vancouver, Montreal, and Edmonton — when it started as a shelf in a women’s resource centre. From credit unions to catering companies to digital studios, expressly feminist businesses have existed in Canada since at least the 1960s.

They’ve only grown from there. Take Bloom + Brilliance, an intersectional and Indigenous feminist-led design agency in Winnipeg, or Aisle, one of the first companies in the world to bring reusable period products to the masses. 

These are just two examples of the feminist businesses spearheaded by diverse feminist entrepreneurs today.

Feminist businesses have always represented a response to traditional business practices and assumptions about success. 

Traditional practices and assumptions revolve around a vision of the white male businessman, forging out his path by any means and cost necessary, propped up by poorly compensated women in the background – wives, domestic and care workers, administrators, and the like. 

There’s little room for fairness, reciprocity, collaboration, and mutual flourishing, let alone personal fulfillment and shared joy. 

People have been questioning this outdated scheme of capitalist success in every element of our work and economy. It’s right there in micro-enterprises of self-employed people, a phenomenon sometimes referred to as “side hustles.” It’s there in medium-sized and scalable businesses and social enterprises making a profit while making the world a fairer, more sustainable place. 

So much of the questioning happens by workers marginalized in our economy. They include newcomers with unrecognized credentials and Indigenous, Black, and racialized women who face greater pay gaps and barriers to leadership. They include mothers and caregivers who can’t get the flexibility they need in typical workplaces. They include 2SLGBTQIA+ people pushed back into the closet when they go to the office.

Feminists have a history of asking, “Why does it have to be like this? Can we do it better?”

Innovating in Business

I think of Canada’s anti-gender-based violence movement as a great innovative feminist gap filler. They spoke the “unspeakable,” naming domestic and sexual violence and opening shelters in the 1970s when survivors of abuse had nowhere to turn.

Feminists do innovative gap filling in business, too.

It’s not just about more women and equity-seeking role models. Representation matters, but feminist entrepreneurship moves beyond numbers in leadership, supply chains, and advertising.

Feminist entrepreneurship is a distinct way of working. It’s setting up work conditions to push back on traditional practices that marginalize diverse women and equity-seeking workers. It uses collective models, inclusive models, and intersectional models of doing business.

It’s generating income to offer human services and employ people who are underemployed, under-supported, and underseen. 

Its companies are grounded in diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) — ideas that aren’t just seen as “nice to have” and thus prone to being miscast as pointless. DEI is core to feminist business performance, growth, and win-wins.

It is not profit at all costs. It’s about profit for human and environmental benefit.

That being said, it’s not surprising that women and Two Spirit, trans, and nonbinary people gravitate to feminist entrepreneurship. In Canada, not-for-profit social enterprises are more often owned by women than both traditional small and medium enterprises and co-operatives. 

This is not necessarily a matter of greater altruism. It’s a matter of practicality. Women and gender-diverse people want better lives for themselves and their communities. They aren’t interested in replicating models that hold them back. They want to be part of the solution.

Transforming the ways we work and generate revenue is always of great interest to those historically left out by the way we work and generate revenue. 

If the promises of feminist entrepreneurship shine so brightly, why aren’t there more feminist businesses in Canada?

Canada’s Entrepreneurial Ecosystem and Feminism

Our entrepreneurial ecosystem is not a friendly space for feminist businesses. There is not enough government support for feminist entrepreneurs, and they’re often left out of decision-making that impacts them. 

Feminist entrepreneurs get missed in economic analyses. For example, Statistics Canada, Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada, and the Business Development Bank of Canada don’t employ feminist-focused approaches in their studies related to women and diverse entrepreneurs. 

Things that don’t get researched don’t get the benefit of government policy improvements and investments.

Our financial institutions still have a lot of barriers to funding. Feminist entrepreneurs miss out on venture capital, loans, investments, and grants. Research shows that women launch businesses with 53% less capital than men. Sexism and bias are part of the problem, yes. But there’s also a lack of recognition for the feminist innovations women and gender-diverse people most often activate in their businesses.

A lack of imagination explains a lot. When we look at the impact of entrepreneurs in Canada, we usually turn to male-dominated sectors like tech and manufacturing. In rare moments, we praise women and gender-diverse entrepreneurs, but we tend to focus on those who succeed in male-dominated spaces.

We need to broaden our horizons, or we won’t progress. Let’s start at the level of imagination to consider fixes.

Let’s conceptualize and research feminist entrepreneurial success. Let’s teach it in business schools.

Let’s reward feminist innovators in all sectors, not just male-dominated sectors, with financing and clout.

Let’s strengthen our entrepreneurial ecosystem with the express goal of growing feminist businesses all over Canada.

Let’s choose feminist businesses when we make our purchases and search for suppliers.

The Canadian Women’s Foundation is taking steps to support feminist entrepreneurs and fill research gaps. But there’s so much more we all need to do to grow feminist business approaches into the economic powerhouse it truly can be.