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Empowering Women Together

The Empowering Women Together initiative (EWT) is a corporate social responsibility program initiated by Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. through the Walmart Foundation.  Launched in 2013, the program aims to empower women in various global communities by connecting women-owned businesses and producers directly with Walmart’s online customer base.  A primary function of the program is supply chain injection, in which women producers are able to sell self-produced goods on Walmart’s internet marketplace to provide an opportunity for a sustainable income.  

The EWT program represents a virtual segment of Walmart’s larger Global Women’s Economic Empowerment Initiative, a 2011 social responsibility program that ventures to utilize the Walmart corporation’s vast size and outreach in order to help empower women throughout the company’s supply-chain.

The Empowering Women Together program’s success has been disputed -- while the initiative has been praised for its attempts to empower women by leveraging Walmart’s expansive online marketplace presence, the program has been met with a number of different cultural and operational issues, and has thus been criticized by some for lack of overall impact.

Background

Role of the Walmart Foundation

The Walmart Foundation, established in 1979, serves as Walmart’s main philanthropic subsidy.  The Foundation supports initiatives in a number of different domains such as the arts and humanities, civic and public affairs, education, health, and social services.  According to the company’s Mission Statement, the Foundation’s main points of focus are on “Associates, children, families, the local community and other local programs that improve the quality of life in our communities.”

The Walmart Foundation first announced the beginning of the Empowering Women Together program in 2013 as a way to further its goal of developing initiatives that empower women globally.  The EWT program was introduced as a derivative of a larger Walmart program, the Global Women’s Economic Empowerment Initiative.  Beginning in September of 2011, the Global Women’s Economic Empowerment Initiative’s goal is to empower women economically by aggregating $20 billion from women-owned enterprises and production organizations by the end of 2016.  In a 2014 interview with the Clinton Foundation, Walmart’s senior director of Federal Government Relations Sarah F. Thorn commented on Walmart’s impetus to start initiatives focusing on women’s empowerment, stating that “empowering women isn’t just the right thing to do; it’s also smart business. The majority of [Walmart’s] 248 million customers are women, and women control well over $20 trillion of annual consumer spending globally. We also know that when we work with women, we have greater impact. Women business owners are more likely to hire and promote women inside their organizations.  And women in emerging markets invest 90 percent of their income back into their families and communities.”

Goals of Empowering Women Together

The Empowering Women Together program’s main purpose is to utilize walmart.com, Walmart’s internet presence, to connect female producers with a market in which to sell their products.  This is accomplished through supply chain injection — women entrepreneurs are able to use Walmart’s resources to distribute their products to the Western world via the company’s online e-commerce platform.  In order to do this, Walmart purchases goods from female suppliers and resells them on walmart.com, thus injecting these women-made products into the company’s wide catalogue of purchasable goods.   At the time of the EWT’s launch, Walmart partnered with 19 different women-owned businesses in 9 countries.  This then grew to more than 30 businesses in 12 countries including Canada, the United States, Haiti, Peru, Ethiopia, Uganda, Rwanda, Kenya, Tanzania, Nepal, India, and Cambodia.  At the time of it’s inception, over half of these women-owned businesses were located in the United States.  The intended effect of the program was to give these partnership communities of women the opportunity to provide a sustainable income, thereby helping to alleviate various cultural issues in regard to women’s financial freedom and overall empowerment.

Operation

Product Collection

The initial product base associated with Empowering Women Together included a selection of various goods that can be broken down into categories that include Clothing and Accessories, Jewelry, Home Furnishings, and Food Products.  The product line includes a number of cultural goods from indigenous populations such as feather necklaces, Peruvian jewelry, Rwandan baskets, and gourmet coffee beans, among others.  As of April 2016, the ‘Featured Categories’ on the Empowering Women Together page of Walmart’s website are ‘Clothing’, ‘Baby’, ‘Beauty’, ‘Health’, ‘Video Games’, ‘Jewelry’, ‘Electronics’, ‘Food’, ‘Home’, and ‘Patio & Garden’.

Partnership Standards

In order to partner with Walmart in the Empowering Women Together program, each individual supplier of goods must meet with a set of standards that comply with Walmart’s operational values. To accomplish this, partnerships work with Walmart in areas such as product design, workplace environment, and initial price setting.

The Empowering Women Together Ethical Audit

Before production can proceed on an Empowering Women Together-related product order, each partnership must undergo an ethical audit.  Aspects of this audit focus mainly on areas of workplace safety, with criteria for essentials such as lighted exit indicators, fire protection equipment, and operating restroom facilities.  Workers are also analyzed, as each EWT partnership employee must be documented, must be of legal age to work, and must have all hours properly recorded.  In addition, no children are permitted in the workplace.  All workplace outposts and facilities related to the EWT program must undergo this standardized audit before a project can commence.

Issues

Cultural and Circumstantial Issues

Because the Empowering Women Together program has operated in a diverse selection of geographical regions, it has encountered both cultural and circumstantial problems unique to different workplace locations. Notable examples of these types of issues are evident in an EWT initiative located in Tanzania with women of the indigenous Maasai culture.  In the Maasai culture, females are considered to be adults at an age younger than those in many Western cultures, usually when they are between ten to fifteen years old.  Thus, although a large number Maasai women expressed interest in participating in the EWT initiative, those who were under eighteen years of age were prohibited to work because of the required ethical audit’s standards, despite the fact that they were considered to be an adult in their own society.  Furthermore, many remote workplace locations that the Maasai women planned to use were deemed to be unsuitable because of infrastructural issues with facilities like plumbing, electricity,  and safety equipment, all of which are required by the ethical audit.  While the third-party auditors did make some exceptions for the Maasai in regard to structural requirements, many potential participants had to be excluded from the process due to cultural issues regarding age and documentation.

In order to properly respond to these types of issues, Walmart sponsored a study undertaken by researchers of the University of Oxford’s Saïd Business School.  The purpose of this study was to develop a cross-cultural guidebook that would help the Empowering Women Together initiative navigate the different issues it faced.  To complete the study, the researchers were guaranteed independence and academic freedom so that they could thoroughly and truthfully analyze both prominent issues as well as the overall impact that Empowering Women Together has had on the global empowerment of women.  The Oxford study focused on three separate EWT initiatives in different locations:  one in Kenya, one in the United States, and one in Tanzania.  These case studies, as well as the accompanying academic research, were completed and released to the public in early 2016.

Structural Issues

In addition to these circumstantial and cultural issues, Walmart has also reported problems with the size and scope of the Empowering Women Together program.  At it’s inception, it was believed by the company that the EWT’s exclusive use of Walmart’s online platform would decrease transaction costs, therefore allowing more suppliers from emerging economies to enter into a partnership.  However, Walmart has met challenges in regard to dealing with these smaller partners, especially in regard to both audit stipulations and costs associated with necessities such as insurance, shipping, and product packaging.  These charges, while perhaps incremental to larger producers, prove challenging to sustain to many smaller partners from areas which have less access to capital.

Reception

While the overall intended goal of the Empowering Women Together program has been considered by many to be positive, critics have questioned the motives behind the initiative of the EWT program, as well as those of the larger Global Women’s Economic Empowerment Initiative.  In reference to a highly publicized domestic legal case concerning alleged discriminatory treatment of female Walmart employees, American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations official Janet Shenk was quoted in The New York Times stating that “Once again, Walmart is avoiding every issue that touches on how its products are produced.  It’s not about who owns the factory. So far as I know, there's no evidence that factories and businesses owned by women treat their employees better or have better conditions than factories and businesses owned by men.”

The EWT Program Today

As of April 2016, the Empowering Women Together program is still an active page on Walmart’s website, and a selection of suppliers’ products is still available for purchase.  According to Walmart’s corporate site, the company is still accepting applications for both domestic and international partnerships for participation in the EWT process.