ABSTRACT
Feminist theories of ethics encompass a fairly wide range of concepts. Feminist ethics is especially critical of sex-based gender roles that naturalize the assignation of traditional female roles to women because women are somehow associated with "feminine" traits such as sensitivity, gentleness, passivity, or domesticity. In other words, the underlying problem with traditional ethics—and the assignation of social and economic roles based on 'male' and 'female' traits—is that it is almost always based on essentialist notions of the female subject. Feminist theories of ethics have enlarged the scope of business ethics both philosophically and empirically. Feminist scholarship is also generating greater awareness of how businesses treat, nurture, and represent the voices and concerns of diverse segments of society, including minority groups, women and so on. In the case of business ethics more particularly, feminist ethics is discussed by a number of scholars as a powerful lens with which to re-examine business practice and governance.
