Excluding Conservatives From Female Empowerment Campaigns Is Bad Politics And Bad Business
This article originally appeared in Forbes.
GoldieBlox, a company promoting engineering as a career to young girls, launched a new #BeLikeHer campaign today. The hashtag campaign celebrates female role models in sports, politics and STEM fields, and encourages participants to post a photo with a sign naming their favorite female role model above the hashtag.
This sounds like a positive, uplifting campaign that we could all get behind.
But the first image in the 2 minute 35 second video is a re-creation of the Women’s March with young girls wearing pink pussy hats and holding signs that say, “A Woman’s Place Is In The Revolution,” “She Persisted,” and “Resister!”
he liberal bias of the campaign immediately turns off conservative women like me. After all, the Women’s March wasn’t a march for all women. It was a progressive political effort. A SurveyMonkey national poll conducted January 26 through 30 found that a large majority of marchers voted for Hillary Clinton—79 percent said they voted for Clinton, 8 percent said they voted for Jill Stein and 5 percent said they didn’t vote. Of course, the video does not include any images of Republican politicians advocating on behalf of women.
Later in the video, Clinton is featured as a “She-ro” and Michelle Obama is named. There is no doubt that the company picked a political side—just readhis accompanying blog post that explains why Clinton is included:
While Hillary Clinton didn’t become the next U.S. president, her campaign ignited women to stand up, march and make their voices heard. Across the U.S. (and around the globe), millions came out in over 600 cities, across 60 countries on all continents. People poured into streets to fight for a host of issues, including women’s rights, immigration reform, racial equality, and much more.
Certainly, the Former Secretary of State and presidential candidate is a role model for many young girls, but so are some female Republican leaders. There is no reason to leave out all Republican women, such as Secretary of Transportation Elaine Chao or U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley.
Women’s empowerment efforts should stop excluding conservative women. They shouldn’t limit the pool to Democrats. Young girls who look up to Carly Fiorina can go into STEM fields too. Fiorina ran a technology company and champions a more inclusive version of feminism.
GoldieBlox’s mission is to help more young girls get into STEM fields:
GoldieBlox is the award-winning children’s multimedia company disrupting the pink aisle in toy stores globally and challenging gender stereotypes with the world’s first girl engineer character. Through the integration of storytelling and STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) principles, GoldieBlox creates toys, books, apps, videos, animation and merchandise; the tools that empower girls to build their confidence, dreams and ultimately, their futures.
This one-sided political video isn’t anything new for GoldieBlox. Their “Girl power 2015” video showcases little girls dressing up as famous women. The second girl is dressed as Clinton with an announcement, “Hillary is in the house,” and the next is “Notorious RBG,” short for Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Once again, no Republican women are featured.
Ensuring girls have the opportunity to pursue their career dreams shouldn’t be a partisan issue. GoldieBlox is a private company that purposely may be appealing to liberal parents to buy its toys.
For companies like GoldieBlox, including right-of-center women in their effort to empower young girls would be good politics and good business. Conservatives want young girls to have the chance to become engineers just as much as liberals do. And beyond politics, GoldieBlox should remember that conservatives buy toys too. But some probably won’t if they realize that the company is perpetuating the unfortunate stereotype that only liberals represent women.