It strikes me, as far as I can tell, that all the girlboss celebrated business are the kind where most of the customers are also women. Glossy businesses and products that women magazines would...
It strikes me, as far as I can tell, that all the girlboss celebrated business are the kind where most of the customers are also women.
Glossy businesses and products that women magazines would have written about anyway.
Let’s make people like Gwynne Shotwell the girlbosses. But then again no because ultimately the idea of celebrating business people regardless of gender is just how we keep normalising and propping up hyper capitalism, growth at all costs, and melting the planet.
Nice that you mention Gwynne Shotwell because she (and the team she leads) is the reason why Elon Musk looks so competent when it comes to space travel and she is such an antidote to the likes of...
Nice that you mention Gwynne Shotwell because she (and the team she leads) is the reason why Elon Musk looks so competent when it comes to space travel and she is such an antidote to the likes of Meg Whitman and Carly Floria.
I think the term “girl” is a “bad smell” in that it is a diminutive. You’d never see second wave feminists use it or, for that matter, have manospherists refer to themselves as “boys”. I think feminists in the third wave embraced the word because they wanted to appeal to the next generation but there are so many problems with it, not least that our culture is obsessed with young women for all the wrong reasons.
That is at least a little of the joke, yes. She would likely have few kind words about how domesticated and ineffective the civil rights movements have become since she passed.
That is at least a little of the joke, yes. She would likely have few kind words about how domesticated and ineffective the civil rights movements have become since she passed.
The people in this article all seemed to aspire to be, or at least marketed to be, celebrities more than businesspeople. If your success state is appearing on magazine covers, not doing the same...
The people in this article all seemed to aspire to be, or at least marketed to be, celebrities more than businesspeople. If your success state is appearing on magazine covers, not doing the same thing for too long is usually the right approach. Running a business (well) is usually a fairly dull, long-term process. Only very high-profile figureheads—the Lagerfelds, Versaces, and Tim Cooks of the world—can expect to be in the spotlight when they release some new collection. If your skincare company puts out a new line, it may get picked up by bloggers and the kinds of publications that run on rewriting corporate press releases, but the CEO isn’t likely to get TV coverage each time it happens.
For consumers, the “girl boss” concept was marketed primarily as a vehicle for MLMs and similar business models that aim to make money for someone other than the person ostensibly running the business. I’m guessing much of the attrition in that market is due to people realizing that they’re not actually making money, and/or the job sucks, and/or the benefits don’t offset the risks.
The term itself is, like the author points out, cringy, and like most identity concepts marketed to women, the cultural perception has increasingly been one of ridicule and distaste. Most women entrepreneurs out there in 2023 probably won’t use the term for themselves if they’d like to be taken seriously.
Jessica Alba seems to be an ur-example of someone who was successful at this though, and her company still seems to be thriving. She's a model/actress who took a hiatus to have a baby, and then...
Jessica Alba seems to be an ur-example of someone who was successful at this though, and her company still seems to be thriving. She's a model/actress who took a hiatus to have a baby, and then started a new career building a consumer products company.
But she is still a model/actress so she had the skill sets to look good on magazine covers and do promotional tours. And that was a big part of rapidly escalating the Honest Company brand into the spotlight. CEOs have different skill sets. Like compare Steve Jobs to Tim Cook. Jobs was a huge product guy and got very involved in deciding what to make, how, and how to market it. Cook is a supply chain guy and is comparatively hands-off on product stuff, but very big on operations stuff. The product stuff seems to be taken on more by Ive, and then later Federighi and Schiller after Jobs left. The company's executive team, ideally, should work as a team with different people's skills compensating for each other.
In Jessica Alba's case, she was clearly good at promotion and strategic vision so that's how she adds the most value to the company. But she hired a CEO and CFO to do the day-to-day management, but she's still the girl-boss.
I will admit that I fell into identifying with the "Girlboss" trend when I finally secured my first internship with a huge company. My past was filled with struggling with money and barely making...
I will admit that I fell into identifying with the "Girlboss" trend when I finally secured my first internship with a huge company. My past was filled with struggling with money and barely making it as a waitress; I nearly cried seeing my first paycheck! But not only was making money that was beyond my dreams as someone familiar with poverty, I was respected and listened to as an equal. It was intoxicating to have made it to that point in my life when compared to my past; I was a Girlboss in my mind. My hard work to return back to school and get a degree finally paid off. Sure I had peers and coworkers from prestigious backgrounds, but in that moment I blended in their ranks.
Then reality hit with the Pandemic and my future outlook was shaken-up; it was a check on my ego and perspective. I was faced with fears that aligned with my past poverty while my more secured peers seemed ambivalent about it. As I've made my way from that landscape, I've become increasingly jaded about this dressed-up version of Pink-Capatilism. Capatilism inherently props up bad actors and actions in the name of driving stock value; putting a pink, girly label on it infantalizes its ramifications. The women who fill these roles also come from backgrounds of celebrity status of sorts as noted in @InfiniteCombonations comment regarding magazine covers. Someone like me who briefly identified with the movement didn't hold the capatilistic pedigree to be on a cover of a widely circulated publication.
The term "girl" is diminutive of Women's accomplishments. I will never forget the sting of having a tech lead introducing me to third-party representative as "girl" despite pioneering an integration with their tool that had never been done before. It is belittling and I have actively been attempting to remove it from language despite old familiarity with using it. By applying it to the Girlboss trend, it does the same thing when applied to the context of Capatilism.
Ohh she's a Girlboss who mistreated BIPOC, that's just a little capatalisim oopsie! Look how strong she is to lead her company! Ignore the attribution case, she's just Girlbossing it!
It doesn't matter how many women are in leadership or hold C-Suite titles; it's Pink-Capatilism if the company is still acting in the hostile ways other large corporations act. It's similar to Rainbow Capatilism in how these trends who highlight social movements are just another way to drive sales.
Ive tried to formulate my thoughts a few times, but each felt like it came up short against the varied factors that play into a cultural moment. But also, the article itself feels like it glosses...
Ive tried to formulate my thoughts a few times, but each felt like it came up short against the varied factors that play into a cultural moment. But also, the article itself feels like it glosses over a lot of the more meaningful insights that could be made.
I poked around, and found a 2020 Atlantic article that fills some of the discussion void the article left me feeling. It touches on my own thoughts about the timing of 'girlboss' as an aspiration, at a time when young millennial women were hopeful in trying to break into careers.
It strikes me, as far as I can tell, that all the girlboss celebrated business are the kind where most of the customers are also women.
Glossy businesses and products that women magazines would have written about anyway.
Let’s make people like Gwynne Shotwell the girlbosses. But then again no because ultimately the idea of celebrating business people regardless of gender is just how we keep normalising and propping up hyper capitalism, growth at all costs, and melting the planet.
Nice that you mention Gwynne Shotwell because she (and the team she leads) is the reason why Elon Musk looks so competent when it comes to space travel and she is such an antidote to the likes of Meg Whitman and Carly Floria.
I think the term “girl” is a “bad smell” in that it is a diminutive. You’d never see second wave feminists use it or, for that matter, have manospherists refer to themselves as “boys”. I think feminists in the third wave embraced the word because they wanted to appeal to the next generation but there are so many problems with it, not least that our culture is obsessed with young women for all the wrong reasons.
Emma Goldman was the real girlboss.
Didn’t she advocate for the abolition of bosses? I can’t help but feel she’d hardly appreciate the title?
That is at least a little of the joke, yes. She would likely have few kind words about how domesticated and ineffective the civil rights movements have become since she passed.
The people in this article all seemed to aspire to be, or at least marketed to be, celebrities more than businesspeople. If your success state is appearing on magazine covers, not doing the same thing for too long is usually the right approach. Running a business (well) is usually a fairly dull, long-term process. Only very high-profile figureheads—the Lagerfelds, Versaces, and Tim Cooks of the world—can expect to be in the spotlight when they release some new collection. If your skincare company puts out a new line, it may get picked up by bloggers and the kinds of publications that run on rewriting corporate press releases, but the CEO isn’t likely to get TV coverage each time it happens.
For consumers, the “girl boss” concept was marketed primarily as a vehicle for MLMs and similar business models that aim to make money for someone other than the person ostensibly running the business. I’m guessing much of the attrition in that market is due to people realizing that they’re not actually making money, and/or the job sucks, and/or the benefits don’t offset the risks.
The term itself is, like the author points out, cringy, and like most identity concepts marketed to women, the cultural perception has increasingly been one of ridicule and distaste. Most women entrepreneurs out there in 2023 probably won’t use the term for themselves if they’d like to be taken seriously.
Jessica Alba seems to be an ur-example of someone who was successful at this though, and her company still seems to be thriving. She's a model/actress who took a hiatus to have a baby, and then started a new career building a consumer products company.
But she is still a model/actress so she had the skill sets to look good on magazine covers and do promotional tours. And that was a big part of rapidly escalating the Honest Company brand into the spotlight. CEOs have different skill sets. Like compare Steve Jobs to Tim Cook. Jobs was a huge product guy and got very involved in deciding what to make, how, and how to market it. Cook is a supply chain guy and is comparatively hands-off on product stuff, but very big on operations stuff. The product stuff seems to be taken on more by Ive, and then later Federighi and Schiller after Jobs left. The company's executive team, ideally, should work as a team with different people's skills compensating for each other.
In Jessica Alba's case, she was clearly good at promotion and strategic vision so that's how she adds the most value to the company. But she hired a CEO and CFO to do the day-to-day management, but she's still the girl-boss.
I will admit that I fell into identifying with the "Girlboss" trend when I finally secured my first internship with a huge company. My past was filled with struggling with money and barely making it as a waitress; I nearly cried seeing my first paycheck! But not only was making money that was beyond my dreams as someone familiar with poverty, I was respected and listened to as an equal. It was intoxicating to have made it to that point in my life when compared to my past; I was a Girlboss in my mind. My hard work to return back to school and get a degree finally paid off. Sure I had peers and coworkers from prestigious backgrounds, but in that moment I blended in their ranks.
Then reality hit with the Pandemic and my future outlook was shaken-up; it was a check on my ego and perspective. I was faced with fears that aligned with my past poverty while my more secured peers seemed ambivalent about it. As I've made my way from that landscape, I've become increasingly jaded about this dressed-up version of Pink-Capatilism. Capatilism inherently props up bad actors and actions in the name of driving stock value; putting a pink, girly label on it infantalizes its ramifications. The women who fill these roles also come from backgrounds of celebrity status of sorts as noted in @InfiniteCombonations comment regarding magazine covers. Someone like me who briefly identified with the movement didn't hold the capatilistic pedigree to be on a cover of a widely circulated publication.
The term "girl" is diminutive of Women's accomplishments. I will never forget the sting of having a tech lead introducing me to third-party representative as "girl" despite pioneering an integration with their tool that had never been done before. It is belittling and I have actively been attempting to remove it from language despite old familiarity with using it. By applying it to the Girlboss trend, it does the same thing when applied to the context of Capatilism.
Ohh she's a Girlboss who mistreated BIPOC, that's just a little capatalisim oopsie! Look how strong she is to lead her company! Ignore the attribution case, she's just Girlbossing it!
It doesn't matter how many women are in leadership or hold C-Suite titles; it's Pink-Capatilism if the company is still acting in the hostile ways other large corporations act. It's similar to Rainbow Capatilism in how these trends who highlight social movements are just another way to drive sales.
Ive tried to formulate my thoughts a few times, but each felt like it came up short against the varied factors that play into a cultural moment. But also, the article itself feels like it glosses over a lot of the more meaningful insights that could be made.
I poked around, and found a 2020 Atlantic article that fills some of the discussion void the article left me feeling. It touches on my own thoughts about the timing of 'girlboss' as an aspiration, at a time when young millennial women were hopeful in trying to break into careers.