Earlier this month, Business Chicks unveiled their latest Latte Magazine cover, sparking controversy for its glaring lack of women of colour.

The glossy façade featured fashionably colour-coded women accompanied by the text: 'Tracey Spicer and the women dismantling discrimination', in reference to Spicer's newly unleashed NOW Australia.

Backlash inevitably followed, with many taking to social media to point out the problem of largely white women as self-proclaimed spearheads of a movement while missing the mark with representation.

Business Chicks sought to defend and diffuse, reassuring commenters that 'diversity was absolutely considered for this cover'.

However, NOW member Nareen Young spoke out in response to the cover, stating, 'I'm on the NOW board. I didn't know about it and I am beyond furious. And I've just seen Instagram and some of what has been offered up. Shameful and embarrassing. Considering position.'

#MeToo, a movement founded and nurtured by Tarana Burke (a civil rights activist and a woman of colour), was intended to be collective and accessible. By contrast, in Australia we are increasingly seeing a mainstream picture of women's liberation that ignores a longstanding struggle for diversity, genuine inclusiveness and radicalism.

Instead, the movement continues to be appropriated by corporate 'feminists' leveraging themes of oppression to gain various forms of capital.

"The problem with this approach is that it fails to reach and empower women on the fringes, or those determined to take a different path than the corporate one."

In April, Spicer openly admitted that NOW Australia 'unashamedly' reaches for the centre, noting she'd been 'attacked by both the extreme left and extreme right'.

Business Chicks speaks similarly to the empowered, middle-class corporate woman with her eye on a seat at the table.

The problem with this approach is that it fails to reach and empower women on the fringes, or those determined to take a different path than the corporate one — that is, envisaging the tearing down and reimagining of the very structures that breed and strengthen oppression.

Rather, the decision to put nearly all white women on the cover of a business magazine highlights an exclusive path available to the wealthy and those willing to navigate the status quo rather than challenge it.

The business landscape is saturated with this kind of thinking. The rhetoric of women-focused organisations that spruik 'mumpreneurs', 'She-E-Os' and #GirlBoss ambassadors inadvertently emphasises women as 'the other', whose inspiration can be drawn from hyper gendered semantics and futile notions of 'girl power'.

Take Business Chick's international annual conference, Movers And Breakers. It's a curated three-day getaway in Fiji for those with a spare $3680-$7390 to splurge on their professional development.

Or consider Spicer's latest campaign of tweeting perky tips accompanied by the hashtag #100daysforchange, such as 'Enquire about hosting a networking night for women within your organisation or industry.'

How do such ventures and advice serve, for example, a single mother working two jobs, and just scraping by on the domestic front? Or those in minimum-wage employment structures where networking events are the stuff of myths?

The issue is not solely Spicer or Business Chicks, rather a broader and pervasive culture of 'inspirational powerhouses' claiming and overshadowing movements, and then high-fiving each other in the absence of elevated viewpoints from the truly marginalised.

If these kinds of individuals and organisations feel inclined to help out on the women's rights front, it needs to be done in a way where they refrain from assuming the position of pioneer, and extend their strategic efforts beyond the limitations of patriarchal capitalism.

The feminist movement has for decades been strengthened, not by white women propelling themselves up the corporate ladder, but by the marginalised, the equipped, and the truly collaborative, bringing their lived experiences into the realm of action.

We need the women who represent the real world (in other words, not just the middle-class) to be elevated as influencers of the levers of budgeting; as deciders of the allocation of resources; and as agitators of real, systemic governmental and policy change.

What we don't need is those privileged and with a platform merely striving to take their likeminded girl gang into the boardroom with them while positioning themselves at the forefront. Trickle-down white feminism from a chipped glass ceiling simply doesn't cut it.

Laura La Rosa is a Melbourne-based writer, designer and producer, with a passion for feminist storytelling. Originally from Sydney, Laura is a proud descendant of the Darug people.