This was published 9 months ago
Opinion
The girl boss isn’t dead, she’s just evolved
Michelle Battersby
Company executiveFor months now, we’ve been told that the era of the “girl boss” has ended.
For those unfamiliar, the term was created in the early 2010s and made famous by self-identifying “girl boss”, Sophia Amoruso. As CEO of now-defunct online retailer Nasty Gal, it seemed Amoruso was trying to tell the world that she wasn’t like regular CEOs – she was a cool CEO.
Emily Weiss, Sophia Amoruso, Leandra Medine and Audrey Gelman were among some of the best known CEOs and leaders of the girl boss era.
The branding exercise phrase piggybacked off a societal shift, whereby a crop of cult-like, female-focused brands, all founded and run by young women, began identify as being “built by women, for women”. Names like Amoruso, Emily Weiss of Glossier, Yael Aflalo of Reformation, Audrey Gelman of The Wing, Leandra Medine of Man Repeller and Steph Korey of Away were front and centre. If the Spice Girls were reimagined and replaced by icons of the girl boss era, those women would have been the new lineup.
To reflect on that time is to realise the full potential of social media and the relatively new trend of going viral, as well as then-new content formats like memes. The thing that many of these companies did, and did well, was they utilised these formats in a way few others could and, in the process, make their companies global successes.
Girl bosses were advocates for working to the point of burnout, working at the expense of their personal lives and championing a culture that expected junior employees to work as hard as senior management. Many male CEOs of the same era did the same, but the girl bosses marketed this kind of behaviour in a way that made it feel aspirational.
For a while, we lifted these women up. But quickly, we also tore them down.
In 2017, The New York Times wrote: “The Wing, A Woman’s Chic Business Club is Going Wide.” By 2020, the follow-up headline read: “The Wing Is a Woman’s Utopia; Unless You Work There”.
Similarly, for Weiss, a 2016 headline read: “Emily Weiss: the Beauty Guru for Millennials”. Six years later: “Glossier’s Emily Weiss, Among the Last of the Girlbosses, Steps Down”, as though female leaders were being told to wrap it up.
The narrative wasn’t perfect, and neither were many of the businesses that embraced the moniker. It lacked representation (almost all the girl boss CEOs were slim, conventionally attractive white women aged in their 20s or early 30s) and its success (and the success of the companies) relied on an aspirational but usually unachievable archetype. It created space for ambition and entrepreneurship to be romanticised by young women, though at times failed to portray that it was deeply unrealistic for the 99 per cent. But it also empowered a generation of women to go for what they wanted.
Phrases like “She-E-O”, and “brains over beauty” are enough to make us squirm these days. The pendulum has swung against hustle culture in favour of better work-life balance and a desire not to dress up or feminise power.
New trends are also entering the zeitgeist. Think “Lazy girl job” (where women are focused, directional and set clear boundaries), “quiet quitting” (doing your job well but not going above and beyond all the time) and “snail girl” (working intentionally and with purpose, rather than clocking up long hours and working across too many things).
Gabrielle Judge, who coined the “lazy girl job” trend, has racked up over 3.7 million views on TikTok, where she explains the desire to be able to find a job that covers living expenses but doesn’t involve staying back late. “Having a 9-5 is still cool and sexy as well as having something that’s flexible and safe.” And she’s right. This is what the girl boss era failed to hold space for. Someone who wants to work, do what’s expected of them, but still have a healthy life outside of work. Essentially, a job that doesn’t involve selling their soul, which is in some ways the antithesis of the girl boss mentality.
For many women, accepting that our careers don’t have to be our number one priority and unlearning the ideal set by the girl boss era is a challenging task.
Many ambitious career women have been left wondering where they fit in. For so long, we’ve been pushed into archetypes – are you a girl boss, a snail girl, a She-E-O, a serious career woman, or family oriented?
Trends on the internet are often extreme; they don’t reflect or encompass the nuance of real-world challenges. We deserve midday breaks, a night without checking emails, the ability to tap out if a role no longer serves us mentally or physically, to embrace the idea that we don’t have to constantly prove our work worthiness while neglecting every other aspect of our lives.
The challenge is to remove the pressure and expectations. In that sense, the girl boss isn’t dead, she’s simply evolved. And in this iteration, she’s not afraid to be multidimensional.
Michelle Battersby is the co-founder and chief marketing officer of Sunroom.
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