How do environmental impact and gender inequality characterise fast fashion supply chains?

Boote, Amy and Lotfi, Maryam ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1261-9834 2023. How do environmental impact and gender inequality characterise fast fashion supply chains? Presented at: 83rd Annual Meeting of the Academy of Management, Boston, Massachusetts, 4-8 August 2023. Academy of Management Proceedings. 10.5465/AMPROC.2023.12101abstract

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Abstract

This paper investigates how environmental impact and gender inequality characterise the fast fashion supply chain, from an ecofeminist perspective. The 21st century has entered into a period of significant anthropogenic environmental challenge, powered by capitalist consumer society; in which, its impacts are inextricably burdensome for women, namely women in the global South. Fast fashion has played a contributory role; becoming renowned for its unsustainable, unethical practices that jeopardise environmental stability and threaten women’s hope for gender parity. In effect, the need for this research is paramount in understanding how fast fashion can break with its ecological and feminist problems. To do so a qualitative method was used. Thematic analysis was conducted on company reports of 75 fast fashion companies for the years 2019-2022. The companies were chosen based on the Fashion Transparency Index 2021. Further, all the companies were defined as fast fashion companies, operating in Europe’s fast fashion industry. The analysis showed that fast fashion companies’ supply chains, contributed to environmental impact through air pollution, water pollution and land pollution. And contributed to gender inequality through ameliorating economic discrimination and gender-based harassment. We concluded that environmental impact and gender inequality reinforce one another both ideologically and materially, in the fast fashion supply chain. Additionally, the study contributes an original and unique literary account regarding its use of the ecofeminism perspective. It filled a literary gap by effectively pointing out that, impacts were felt acutely in the global South by women garment workers. And, therefore, brings to academic attention that, women garment workers are subjected to fast fashion’s patriarchal governing structure and placed on the front line of the environmental crisis, which has emanated from fast fashion’s supply chain practices.

Item Type:	Conference or Workshop Item (Paper)
Date Type:	Publication
Status:	Published
Schools:	Business (Including Economics)
ISSN:	0065-0668
Last Modified:	09 Aug 2024 01:30
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/158528

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