Trickle Down Feminism

     In Sarah Jaffe’s article, Jaffe makes quite a few many good points in regards to what can be considered mainstream feminism. It was very common to see videos, and other posts celebrating things such as having a female CEO, but it is important to dissect what it really means to have a female CEO. To many feminists, including those in previous readings, feminism is about the dismantling of systematic structures that disadvantage marginalized groups. What that means is that a woman taking the role of a man is not something to be celebrated. Jaffe makes an excellent point about how women “make up just under half of the national work force, but about 60 percent of the minimum wage workforce and 73 percent of tipped workers” This statistic does not even take into consideration other aspects such as race, or disabled workers. Jaffe mentions women of color three times in this article, but even then it was added in as though it was an afterthought. This is especially important to mention when Jaffe mentions how domestic work is made up of mainly women of color and immigrants. However, I think it is important to note that more often than not, these are women who are exploited, and that undocumented immigrants happen to be the largest victims of this because companies and managers see this as an opportunity to take advantage of their legal status in order to profit the most off of them. The reason I bring this up is because although Jaffe brings up many good points about class, this is still seen through a very capitalistic lens and it is a problem because it does not address the structure that allows these women to be exploited in the first place, and that it is because of the structures in place that force them to take these jobs at such low wages with no benefits.
     I think it is also really important to note that the male female dichotomy is not so simple because it is not just women immigrant workers who are exploited, but also immigrant men as well. Also, men of color have even less corporate positions at CEO. While women were celebrating the new woman CEO of Facebook, there are still more women as CEOs in the Fortune 500 than there are black people.  Therefore, if we were to base this argument on CEOs of Fortune 500s alone, all people of color suffer more than white women do. Of course, the entire point of this is not to simply replace those in positions of power with marginalized people, but rather to completely destroy and remove the structures in place that allow all of this in the first place.