A woman can recognize that her multi-level marketing (MLM) business is costing her money and still feel that it has saved her. Perhaps, for the first time in years, someone notices her effort. Her phone fills with encouragement when she first joins the sales team. When her sales disappoint, other women reassure her that they have struggled too. She belongs to a group of supportive individuals who encourage her and make her feel like she is a part of something bigger.
This dynamic is something that dwindling funds cannot fully represent. In MLMs, financial exploitation and emotional attachment reinforce each other through losses and subsequent comfort by the community. Leaving such a dynamic would mean confronting the debt and losing the people helping her bear it.
An Answer To a Real Need
Women’s involvement in MLMs needs to be understood in the context of the choices society makes available to them. Women are often expected to interrupt paid work to raise children or care for relatives, then face a job market that treats those years of essential, unpaid labor as gaps in their qualifications.
Multi-level marketing (MLM) is a sales model in which independents sell a company’s products while also recruiting others into a tiered sales network, often called a “downline”.
Although MLMs present participants as business owners, the company controls the compensation plan while distributors bear expenses such as inventory, fees, training, travel, and marketing.
These cultish schemes disproportionately target women. Affordable childcare and adequately paid, flexible employment can be difficult to find. In some conservative religious communities, expectations that women remain home with their children further narrow their options, even when their households need another income.
An MLM’s promise of earning money from home, gaining recognition, and joining a supportive community speaks directly to those pressures. Recruitment through trusted friends or fellow religious congregants can make that promise feel especially credible.
It is absolutely necessary to understand that none of this reflects a lack of intelligence, ambition, or judgment on women’s part. It reflects a society that relies on women’s caregiving while providing too little economic support for it and the proliferation of businesses willing to exploit the resulting dynamic. Responsibility for that exploitation belongs to those who practice it, not to women seeking independence and belonging.
In religious communities where women are expected to prioritize homemaking, a “family-friendly” business can appear to reconcile financial independence with those expectations.
Where questioning authority is discouraged, a recruit may also struggle to challenge a respected mentor. An MLM can borrow the language of service and shared values, making scrutiny of a business arrangement feel like disloyalty to a community she cherishes.
“Be your own boss” speaks to a legitimate desire for autonomy, yet the company controls the compensation plan and participation rules while the woman carries the risk. A woman may be celebrated as an entrepreneur while supplying unpaid marketing, emotional labor, and access to her friends.
The Allure of Community
An unusually intense welcome coupled with enthusiastic praise can accelerate feelings of belonging well before any woman invests into an MLM.