Rebranding Elle or feminism?

Or jumping on the bandwagon? Fashion magazine launches project to 'Rebrand Feminism'.

Elle magazine has arranged for three feminist groups to team up with three leading advertising agencies to create marketing campaigns with the aim of persuading more women, and men, to realise that they are - and to call themselves - feminists.

Make them Pay is a campaign to end the gender pay gap, and is one result of this Rebranding Feminism project.

British women earn on average 15 per cent less than their male colleagues; Make Them Pay is asking women to talk to male colleagues who do the same job about how much they earn and, if they earn more, to ask their bosses for a pay rise.

A website has been created where men and women can select from a list of broad occupational groups, and enter their pay and the level they are at. They then receive a message showing them how much more, or less, they earn compared to people of the opposite sex who are doing the same job. Women earning less than their male counterparts are encouraged to e-mail their bosses.

Ad agency Mother worked with newly-launched Feminist Times  to come up with Make Them Pay.

Equality Minister Jo Swinson has backed the campaign, saying that if bosses refuse to co-operate she will force companies to publish data about how much they pay men and women.

A second element of the project features a flow chart exploring the possible reasons why only one in seven women identify themselves as feminist ‘feminism is too extreme’ against 'extreme' facts like, for example, that 400,000 women are sexually assaulted each year in the UK, created by Jinan Younis, who was trolled for setting up a feminist society at her school, working with ad agency Brave.

Vagenda's co-founders, Holly Baxter and Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett collaborated with Wieden + Kennedy (W+K) on a poster entitled ‘Sod the Stereotypes’.

It reads: ‘I am not an apple shape nor a pair...’. and lists words and phrases commonly associated with women like ‘mistress’, ‘princess’ and ‘have it all’, before concluding, ‘I’m a woman, the rest is up to you’.

Any attempt to highlight the gender pay gap, or challenge stereotypes and discrimination against women must be a good thing and this campaign has certainly generated a lot of media attention.

And it may reach women who would not normally identify with these issues.

Some may even get a pay rise out of it.

So why do I still feel a little queasy?

And why is Elle suddenly so concerned about feminism?

It may be that only one in seven women describe themselves as feminist, but you would have to be living on a different planet not to notice that feminist ideas are very popular at the moment.

Campaigns like No More Page Three, Everyday Sexism, One Billion Women Rising and #TakebackTwitter have had massive support from women and men.

Elle is a fashion magazine. Feminist ideas are fashionable. Elle is beginning to realise that, if you want to sell magazines to women in the 21st Century you have write about things that women are interested in, and that means offering more than just fashion, beauty, celebrity and horoscopes.

It’s not feminism that is being rebranded, it’s Elle.

Story published on Women's Views on News, 8 October, 2013.