Is This the Last Wave of Feminism?

When Beyonce declared herself a feminist in her now-classic MTV performance of Flawless in 2015, the fourth wave of feminism reached peak mainstream influence. While the previous three waves of feminism made great strides, they’ve also been rolled back in a way this one won’t; thanks to the use of tech like blogs, social media, and women-only online groups, the ideas of feminism have become pervasive. As movements like #metoo spread overnight thanks to Twitter, we’re seeing real, lasting reform as harassers are outed and companies and major institutions modernize outdated policies and review in earnest their treatment of women. We’re now navigating the difficult work of implementing the necessary shifts to make our institutions and society reflect these principles.

Unlike past waves, technology has been a powerful catalyst of the fourth wave — accelerating women’s ability to integrate the ideals gained from previous waves, and transmit them to a broader, global audience. We’ve seen rapid growth of women’s ability to organize, at scale, resulting in tangible wins and changes in social norms. Tech enabled women-only groups to organize, strategize and iterate, which allowed their efforts to reach a critical mass while bypassing the male gatekeepers that control media and other avenues of communication. As a result, technology has been used as a means for consciousness-raising, communication, organization, and activism.

Technology is giving women access to feminist thinking, and ways to become active in the movement, on a scale and with a speed that’s never been seen before. But as we shift into a post-feminist time period where feminism is being accepted, celebrated, and applied, we have to wonder what comes next. This fourth wave may be the end of feminism as we’ve come to know it in the past. And unlike past waves, this last wave won’t roll back.

The Previous Waves
Quick history lesson: there have been three distinct waves of feminism. In the 19th century, the first wave ushered in suffrage and property rights. The second wave in the 1960s addressed reproductive rights and the equal rights amendment. The third wave in the 1990s focused on individualism and intersectionality. During the second wave, “consciousness-raising salons” emerged, small groups of 10–20 women began meeting in each other’s homes in New York and Chicago, where they discussed how sexism affected their life, work, and family. These groups “allowed women to verbalize feelings they may have dismissed as unimportant. Because discrimination was so pervasive, it was difficult to pinpoint. Women may not have even noticed the ways a patriarchal, male-dominated society oppressed them. What an individual woman previously felt was her own inadequacy could have actually resulted from society’s ingrained tradition of male authority,” according to ThoughtCo.

Now, technology has not only given women the ability to replicate the core tools of feminist movements like these consciousness-raising salons, but also expand their reach to women all over the world, regardless of race, class, or geography.

The Downside of Tech
The rising prevalence of technology has been a double-edged sword for women, creating both challenges and opportunities. While technology itself is impersonal and objective, what has become clearer with time is that a narrow segment of the population controls the design and development, resulting in tech that reflects social biases and conditioning, and contributes to replicating social biases against women, in online spaces. Women are about twice as likely as men to say they have been targeted for online harassment because of their gender, and 37% of women have been harassed online, according to a 2017 Pew survey. The design of tech reflects the coded patriarchy in our society, with companies building platforms that contribute to a hostile and predatory environment for women online.

Rise of Private Groups
The harassment endemic in online spaces had an unintended consequence from the male trolls who sought to silence women online: it accelerated the need for and growth of women-only groups.

It was in this environment, with its potent mix of technology, feminist awareness, and active communities, that one of the first women’s online networks was born in 2010. Journalist, entrepreneur, and Twitter “gender avenger” Rachel Sklar had her fill when she saw one too many stories about Silicon Valley tech entrepreneurs that omitted women. Reaching out to 20 women she respected to see if they would help her raise awareness about this issue, she soon had a listserve that ballooned to 500 women. Now commonly known as “The List”, they’re known for having launched the #changetheratio hashtag and criticizing all-male panels (“manels”). For its members, The List serves as far more than a space for activism. Members share resources, valuable professional introductions, professional, and personal resources.

Soon a wave of online groups began to follow, as a response to challenges faced both online and offline by women. Groups such as Female Founders Fund, Dreamers and Doers, The Femps, and Latinas Think Big focus on empowering female entrepreneurs, while groups like Tech Ladies, Women in Tech, and Geek Girls focus on women in tech.

The release of Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In in 2013, which went on to sell 2.5 million copies, further ignited the movement of women’s groups. Though many aspects of the book are considered controversial, the Lean In phenomenon sparked an important conversation around women, leadership, and the workplace that wasn’t happening before in a serious way. There are now thousands of Lean In Circles in 160 countries, and millions of members (Lean in China’s circle alone has over 1.5 million members)

“Digital Burqas?”
At a recent private forum on gender and tech, Observer Research Foundation President Samir Saran posed whether women-only private and secret networks function as a new “purdah” system or “digital burqas” — a type of technical ghettoization that places women where men want them: quietly out of the way and out of public view. However, that’s not the case. Actually, private groups have functioned as spaces where women organize their activism more quickly and efficiently than in the past. Rather than staying quietly out of the way, women honed their strategies and messages before taking their activism out into the world in new and powerful ways.

Although many factors contributed to the rise of women’s groups, one important catalyst was the 2016 election. Many of the groups that already existed became lightning rods for activism, and countless new groups popped up overnight and mushroomed in the days leading up to the election and after Donald Trump became president. Pantsuit Nation grew to over 3.5 million users in less than four weeks leading up to the election. The post that led to the Women’s March was sent to 10 friends, ballooned to 10,000 people overnight and 1.5 million people in two weeks, and became the largest political mobilization in history. Ultimately, 1 out of every 100 Americans marched, and there were more than 261 marches abroad, and on all 7 continents. To truly understand the impact of technology, compare this to the first March on Washington organized by Martin Luther King Jr. in the 1963: it took over a year to organize by telegram and phone.

While the Women’s March and #metoo movement receive the most attention, what many don’t realize is that the they were enabled by the proliferation of private networks of women online. In the case of the contemporary #metoo campaign, it began early on as a list of predatory men circulated by women in private networks. For example, women who were fundraising in Silicon Valley would warn other women attending industry conferences about which VCs or investors they should steer clear of. These “whisper networks” brought to light that often multiple women had had negative experiences with the same bad apples, leading many women to feel for the first time that they weren’t alone. It made them braver, as women shifted from anonymous allegations to naming names.

Other lists popped up in different fields, like the “Shitty Media Men” list , which was built and shared in networks of professional women. It spread overnight thanks to the ease of sharing your own story via an editable, anonymous Google Doc, and how quickly women could circulate the list just by hitting “forward.” As the allegations about Justin Caldbeck and other accused men hit the mainstream press, these private lists were used by journalists to quickly build stories and corroborate timelines. The rest was history. The #MeToo hashtag went on to become a global phenomenon, spreading around the world with over 1 million tweets in 48 hours and over 12 million posts, comments, and reactions on Facebook in less than 24 hours.

Another impressive example is the record-breaking number of women running for political office in 2018. Emily’s List, a group focused on electing pro-choice Democratic women to national, state and local office, was inundated with requests: “More than 20,000 have approached Emily’s List about running for office in the year since Trump’s election; normally the group has fewer than 1,000 requests at this point in the cycle,” according to Time. In this instance, groups like Emily’s List and the 2017 Women’s Conference became the central spaces for a new wave of women fed up with the outcome of the election and exasperated by the new administration’s efforts to roll back progress on women’s issues. Where did they turn to find support? To online groups where it was easy to connect with like-minded women.

Blogs and Social Media
The proliferation of blogs and new social media platforms also helped bring previously unreachable — but like-minded — women into the conversation by creating content that was accessible, digestible, and easily shareable. Starting around 2010, we saw the rise of blogs like Jezebel, Vagenda, and Feministing, which ushered in a post-The Daily Show tone that used humor and incredulity to express shock at misogyny and give their audiences the tools to deconstruct the daily barrage of white male hetero-normativity they were inundated with. The message was “you’re not crazy, we see it too. These feminist blogs served an important role by normalizing the lexicon around rape culture, intersectionality, and freeing the nipple, while giving greater visibility to everyday forms of sexism and harassment in the workplace and on the street, to sexual assault on campus sexual. These sites took on the assumptions around white male privilege and heteronormativity that was often endemic in the media and smashed them, while making us laugh.

Vagenda re-wrote mainstream media headlines into ones that showed the media’s implicit biases against women. For example, an actual headline from The Daily Mail, “Make-up free Jennifer Garner hides her enviable figure under dowdy slacks and shirt during coffee run in Los Angeles,” Vagenda ran side-by-side with the same photo and the headline, “Woman goes to get coffee. Doesn’t consider it a priority that her outfit makes her look sexually appealing for this task.”

The importance of these women-centric blogs can’t be underplayed. They used tech to bring a modern brand of feminism to a new audience, updating it for the language and temperament of a Millennial and Xennial audiences. Their work created the foundation for what lead to the rise of movements like the Women’s March, and later propelled Tarana Burke’s nascent #metoo hashtag into the center of a national conversation. More importantly, they reframed these topics by centering women’s concerns and perspective — in a way that wasn’t happening anywhere else in the media, and especially couldn’t be done when men were controlling mainstream media content. Unlike old media platforms, where the draw was the author and content, these new platforms thrived because of the perspective and the community. Readers knew to scroll down to the comments for the best reactions, or to jump in and join the conversation. While advertisers quickly learned how to spot the blogs with the most engaged readerships, the communities gained a sense of their own power.

How Women Benefit from these Women-Only Spaces
Whether online or in person, the new wave of women-only groups help with consciousness-raising by revealing patriarchy and providing a space for women to unlearn toxic mindsets and behaviors that result from patriarchal socialization and internalized misogyny. They also help remove the feelings of isolation or “is it just me?” that women can feel when they’re marginalized. Together, they lose the perception that other women “have it all,” and that they are the only ones struggling in the male-dominated environment.

Women-only groups also helps women unlearn unhealthy types of competition that women internalize in their careers, like lateral aggression. Lateral aggression occurs in marginalized groups as a result of systemic oppression, leading to sabotaging behaviors within the group including bullying, gossiping, and backstabbing. It arises in professional settings when women perceive that there are a limited number of positions available. Many women feel that they’ve experienced as much or more bullying from women, than men in the workplace — and they’re right. While men target both men and women equally with aggressive behavior, research shows that 65% of perpetrators in the workplace are women, and that 79% of those bullied are targeted because of gender. Women-only groups are often the first time that women experience being in the majority with professional peers. Women are no longer competing with each other for limited spots in a male-defined space. In a space designed by women, they can experience each other as a network and community of unconditional support. These women-only spaces also provide a testing ground to question and address forms of mainstream misogyny and create an effective playbook for the target audience.

Women-only spaces have allowed women to have their experiences and needs centered away from the male gaze. They’re important because they’re one of the few spaces women can disconnect from the emotional labor of “performative femininity” — the performance of gender roles learned through social conditioning and reinforced through idealized images of women in popular media. Often the images that represent femininity — one-dimensional stereotypes of women as nice, sweet, quiet, likable princesses — are designed by men. Although women make 85% of consumer purchasing decisions, only 11% of advertising creative directors in 2016 were women. Performative femininity results from the constant centering of the male gaze, even when the subject is women: like tampon commercials featuring blue water, or shaving commercials featuring hairless women. Combined over time, these images create an environment that normalizes the erasure of actual female experiences. Yet women-only groups allow women to get access to resources about topics that are ignored or made invisible in wider media, including periods, sexuality, fertility, and motherhood, among others. It’s no wonder there are countless online chatrooms for women devoted to these topics, safe spaces where no one has to perform according to male-set standards. These discussions are also leading to major shifts in the marketplace, with the entire $1.1 billion Femtech industry (health and sexual products for women) coming out of these women-only discussions, which wouldn’t have otherwise existed.

Is This The Last Wave?
Technology is far from perfect for women, yet it has given women the ability to replicate the core tools of past feminist movements — consciousness-raising salons, activism, education, organization — with infinitely more speed and efficacy. Thanks to tech, women have been able to take the work that was done in the isolation of small feminist groups in the past and to quickly incubate and iterate their strategies, then scale their efforts to create tangible changes in the world. Ultimately, this hybridization of tech and feminism has allowed women to create greater agency than ever: by reframing the national conversation, expressing our vulnerabilities, helping each other through beneficial networks, calling out harassment, and mobilizing millions of women to demand true parity at work and in society at large.

The increasing acceptance of feminism as a philosophy and as a matter of practical application in business, politics, and every other sphere in today’s world means we’ve crossed an important threshold. As gender equality is being accepted, celebrated, and applied, it suggests that this fourth wave is the end of feminism as we’ve come to know it. This is because ours is the first generation to internalize the principles of gender equality — so all current and future institutions created from here on out will have these principles embedded in their DNA.

–Danielle Kayembe

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