For decades, Nike has committed itself to gender equity. As a teenager, I was taken by the company’s empowering messages to young female athletes like myself as it rode the coattails of Title IX. For years I slept next to a poster of a young white woman running along an open road. It read, “There are clubs you can’t belong to. Neighborhoods you can’t live in. Schools you can’t get in to. But the roads are always open. Just do it.”

Yet, even as Nike marketed empowerment to middle- and upper-class girls like me in the U.S., the company was hit by accusations of abusive practices against poor, young female laborers in its factories around the world throughout the 1990s. As it struggled to recover from these critiques in the early 2000s, the company poured over $100 million into programs for poor adolescent girls in Asia, Africa, and Latin America as a solution to ending poverty through its philanthropic brand, the Girl Effect. After a decade of investing in adolescent girls around the world, the company seemed to have recovered from its tarnished image despite sporadic media coverage of labor unrest in its factories.

But a powerful internal uprising of Nike’s female employees this spring has exposed the company’s toxic gender culture from its C-suites on down. The recent investigation by its employees into pay inequity, lack of female executives, and a pervasive “boy’s club” resulted in a spring housecleaning of the company’s top executives and called into question the company’s commitment to gender equity.

Related: Nike CEO apologizes to staff for boys’ club culture at the company

Nike isn’t alone. My research over the past decade shows that corporate programs focused on empowering girls and women through their philanthropy and corporate social responsibility efforts often circumvent a fundamental contradiction: Their business practices exacerbate gender inequality even as they claim to invest in girls and women.

Take the recent case of Apple. Interviews with Bloomberg News in January revealed that workers at an Apple contract factory in China are working in dangerous labor conditions, including standing for excessive hours and handling chemicals without proper protection. As widely documented, workers in Chinese manufacturing are overwhelmingly poor, young uneducated females. The following week Apple announced it was partnering with the Malala Fund, founded by Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Malala Yousafzai, to support education for 100,000 girls in India and Latin America.

Commitments by Walmart and Gap to invest in girls and women over the past decade despite ongoing class action lawsuits against Walmart for gender discrimination and numerous scandals in Gap’s contract factories provide further evidence of this contradiction.