ABSTRACT
Over ten years ago I wrote ‘Gendered Company: Enterprise and Governance at the Institute of Directors’.1 That early (1997) article was an attempt to consider how companies and company law intersect with feminist ideas. I argued then that
a cursory glance at the history of English company law reveals the maleness of the company. In 1604 the advantages of the concept of joint stock were described as follows: ‘A whole company, by this means, is become as one man’. Lord Halsbury’s speech in Salomon v. A Salomon & Co Ltd. included the following: “Once a company is legally incorporated it must be treated like any other independent person … ” … Although corporate legal theory has always used the seemingly gender neutral formula of the company as a separate legal person, at the birth of this concept the person was male.2
