Hot off celebrating her boyfriend’s win at the Super Bowl, Taylor Swift has arrived in Australia and has played three sold out shows in Melbourne.
At 34 years of age, Taylor Swift has already amassed the ability to move literal economies. Regularly named one of the most influential women on the planet, if she were an economy of her own, she’d be bigger than the GDP of 50 countries. And thanks to the record-breaking success of her Eras tour, she is also now a billionaire. But is she a feminist billionaire?
While I’m not a Swiftie per se, I do appreciate some of her hot money takes, her iconic awards show behaviour, and I can also get behind her decision to re-record her catalogue after her music manager sold the rights out from under her.
And while we can certainly debate Taylor Swift’s feminist credentials, before we can declare her a feminist billionaire — we first need to decide if it’s even possible — or whether the very existence of ten-figure songstresses is antithetical to feminist principles that fight for equity, the redistribution of wealth, and freedom from patriarchy, and other systems of oppression. Let’s go.
Gold Rush
As a feminist copywriter and campaigner, I work with predominantly women-led and purpose-driven businesses, tackling taboos on all things money, power and freedom, trying to create a more just and equitable world through words. Unashamedly, I want to see more money in the hands of more diverse people, because in our current society, money = freedom.
So you can imagine my delight during a content planning session with a client a few months ago, when this paradox was floated: Is there such a thing as a feminist billionaire?
My mind started to race.
What would be the criteria?
Is Taylor Swift one? Oprah? Melinda French Gates?
Whose feminism?
Is there an ethical way to make a fortune?
I admit, at first — I figured, sure, it’s possible — but it would depend heavily on how you made your money and what you did with it.
You couldn’t earn it profiting from oppression, monetising suffering or extracting it from others (or the land). And you couldn’t spend it in ways that further entrench poverty, discrimination and injustice.
Yet, the more I started to think about it, the waters got murkier.
Best believe I’m still bejeweled
If we look at how many women in the world are considered to be billionaires, there are currently 337 women billionaires around the globe and they make up 13 percent of the global billionaire population. So, they’re in the minority.
Among them — Françoise Bettencourt Meyers, founder of L’Oréal. MacKenzie Scott (formerly Bezos). Rihanna. Kim Kardashian. Melanie Perkins, founder of Canva. Oprah. Melinda French Gates. Sheryl Sandberg. Gina Rinehart. And as of October 2023, Taylor Swift.
Just over 100 women on the list are considered to be ‘self-made’ — as in they founded or cofounded a company or established their own fortune, as opposed to inheriting it. Truth be known, unpacking what counts as ‘self-made’ deserves an article of its own.
Call It What You Want
Going back to the data for a moment — in 2023, Emma Ischinsky & Daria Tisch studied ‘Women in the Global Super Rich’. They found a modest increase in the percentage of women billionaires between 2010 and 2023, from 9.0 to 12.8 percent. While the women on the list considered to be ‘self-made’ more than doubled, women who were heirs to intergenerational fortunes also increased by 43 percent in that same time period. And there it is.
We absolutely must differentiate between the source of a billionaires’ wealth, particularly when it comes to studying gender differences.
But of course, just because you’re a woman, a billionaire and/or an entrepreneur, doesn’t make you a feminist. Though, I’d argue, it’s not possible to be the latter without the hard fought sacrifices of those who are.
Champagne Problems
So, if we take a look at the handful of people who might be considered feminists and billionaires — does anything start to become clearer? Do we see women held to a higher standard? And what does it mean to earn and spend money in a feminist way?
According to women-run investing platform Verve Money, a financial feminist is someone who embraces the “crucial intersection of feminism and finance” to break down gender barriers and foster economic equality.
It means being in control of how, when, and on what you spend your money. It means supporting women and non-binary owned and led businesses. And it means making sure your money, including investments and superannuation, is driving the world towards equality — not funding fossil fuels, guns, or modern slavery.
To me, being a financial feminist also means valuing unpaid, invisible and mental labour. It means supporting (and funding) reproductive rights. It means supporting paid parental leave and fighting for pay equity. It means redistributing your wealth, be it earned or inherited. It means a lot of things, and this is just at a minimum.
So, are there any billionaires ticking some, or all, of these boxes?
Castles Crumbling
Both Melinda French Gates and MacKenzie Scott donated $US40 million to gender equality initiatives in 2021. French Gates is well known for her philanthropy, and since her divorce settlement, Scott has already given away nearly half her fortune. That’s something.
Sara Blakely, founder of Spanx, pledged to give the majority of her wealth away, joining Bill Gates and Warren Buffett’s Giving Pledge.
Oprah Winfrey gives back through a school for girls in South Africa, via historically Black schools and universities in the US, and to disaster relief and humanitarian organisations. Again, this is not nothing.
But the reality is that the world’s billionaires could give money away constantly, and they’d still have plenty of it. Thanks to tax loopholes and compound interest (to name two), a billion dollars is still a helluva lot of money. It’s literally one thousand million dollars. 1,000,000,000 — that’s a lot of zeros in anyone’s language.
Shake It Off
At its heart, the question of whether there can be such thing as a feminist billionaire is more than a mere juxtaposition of financial status and feminist ideals; it’s examining the inherent contradictions and inequities within systems of wealth and power through a feminist lens.
So, let’s explore, for a moment, who is able to accumulate wealth in our current society, and how narrow the definition of ‘wealth’ truly is.
‘The Man’ (has a lot to answer for)
‘Wealth’ is typically defined as an abundance of valuable material possessions or resources. Agonisingly myopic, seeing wealth this way fuels inequality, ever deepening the divide between the ‘haves’ and the ‘have nots’. It also fails to recognise or value the diverse and meaningful contributions and needs of all members of society. After all, we’re not sitting here discussing billionaire nurses or social workers. So, let’s agree ‘wealth’ needs a wholescale redefinition.
While we’re at it, we’re gonna need more than a moment, and someone far more qualified than me, to speak to the ongoing impacts of colonisation, stolen wages, and the widespread dispossession of First Nations people — because we cannot talk about ‘wealth’ without also talking about colonisation.
We need more than a moment to speak to the intergenerational impacts of slavery and its direct theft of labour. We need more than a moment to speak to immigration policies that restrict job opportunities, access to social services, and the ability to own property for migrants, refugees and people seeking asylum. And we would need more moments still, to speak to the myriad gender, age and race wealth gaps.
All of this without even touching on taxation (a feminist issue), the efficacy of so-called mega philanthropy, financial abuse, or climate emissions of the uber wealthy (including Ms Swift, I’m sorry to say).
Long Story Short(ish)
While it’s been a little ‘1 Step Forward, 3 Steps Back’ for those who came for the Tay Tay content — this is where I have settled: no — there is no such thing as a feminist billionaire.
At least not in a system that allows such an unequal distribution of wealth (and power).
Not unless everyone has their basic needs met, for food, water, housing, agency, and justice. Along with their needs for connection, joy, and things-beyond-survival.
Not in an economy with such a narrow definition of ‘wealth’ as to have half of the world’s wealth owned by one percent of the population, while ten times that many live in poverty.
And not if we agree that feminism, at its core, is about challenging systemic inequities and advocating for the dismantling of oppressive structures, which would include the very systems that enable the accumulation of wealth to the magnitude of billions in the first place.
So, I’m sorry Taylor et al., you may be a lot of things, maybe even a billionaire feminist. But a feminist billionaire? There ain’t no such thing.