Gendered Discourses Produced Within the Corporate Sustainability Context: An Analysis on Turkiye

Abstract

The current global political context of women’s empowerment is focusing on a sustainable economy and society. Corporate sustainability practices on women’s empowerment outgrow the concept of the struggle for gender equality at the workplace. Although women’s empowerment is positioned as one of the solutions for sustainability, there is a debate on the results of the corporate-led empowerment agenda, where remains a discursive terrain of such initiatives. The purpose of this research is to analyze the discourses produced by corporate companies in Turkey within the context of women’s empowerment for sustainable development and to present an empirical inquiry to bring up whether gendered discourses are produced. This research draws from all the approved corporate sustainability reports of Turkish companies and the findings of this research emerge from the literature review, field research, and theoretical and empirical work all together. Forty two companies out of the analysed 53 have statements on women’s empowerment and research findings show that these statements include gendered discourses. Gendered discourses are grouped into 5 groups (according to the idea of gendering) as: discourses produced with gendered biases, discourses reflecting power domination, discourses that include gratuitous premodifiers, discourses othering women, and discourses including gender generic nouns. All groups of discourses are discussed through related theories of gender and power. The research findings provoke new directions for future research problematizing ‘doing gender’ through language with the new questions it calls over the power politics of gender equality and empowerment of women.