Is she a #GirlBoss or are you just a misogynist?
It seems that term is now getting applied to any woman in a workplace for existing.
Here is a history lesson.
It all started with a businesswoman named Sophia Amoruso. She was the one that coined the term Girlboss. It was also the title of her autobiography. Three years later, said autobiography became a Netflix television show. It lasted for one season.
Amanda Mull1 of the Atlantic writes:
“...the entrepreneur Sophia Amoruso...proposed a convenient incrementalism. Instead of dismantling the power men had long wielded in America, career women could simply take it for themselves at the office...#Girlboss argued that the professional success of ambitious young women was a two-birds-one-stone type of activism: Their pursuit of power could be rebranded as a righteous quest for equality, and the success of female executives and entrepreneurs would lift up the women below them.”
At first, the term was embraced.
Women held it like gold only until it stained their hands black-green. And, like anything on the Internet, the term was not assessed with introspection and constructive critique. Instead, it was met with virtue-signaling and pretension.
And, like many things in discourse, once it was deemed Problematic™, all the moralistic frenzy served to cloak our good friend, Misogyny. We ended up seeing so-called progressive people apply it to every single career woman for having the gall to be visible.
Look, the concept of Girlboss is an issue. It is. Amoruso’s business practices are an issue. There are terrible female bosses out there. And you should call them out like you do terrible male bosses. You just do not have to call them girlbosses. You can call them what they are, shitty bosses.
Shittiness has no gender.
As my friend Dhaaruni2 pointed out, are we going to refer to men like Mitch McConnell as Boybosses?
So-called progressive people will not like admitting this, but reclaiming Girlboss as an insult to toss around to anyone female is pretty sexist.
They, like everyone else, grew up in a society where career women are portrayed as cold and selfish monsters. Let’s face it, it’s in their subconscious. It’s in my subconscious too. As it is in yours, readers. Yes, even other women internalize that.
I remember when The Devil Wears Prada (2006) came out. It was the film that no one would stop talking about. It made such a pop-cultural impact that a television channel featured a segment interviewing a woman whose ex-boss was, apparently, a real-life Miranda Priestly. After describing all the terrible things her boss pulled on her, the woman ended it with a statement that had my jaw drop. She said something along the lines of, “I do not want to work under a female boss ever again.”
Right, because there are only ever wonderful male bosses. You know, such as Scott Rudin.3
We are not evil for internalizing this bullshit. This doesn’t make us awful people. It makes us human beings capable of dismantling that thinking and improving ourselves.
Movies from the 70s into the 2000s have long framed the career woman as a frigid, wicked woman. The evil career woman needs a man and a baby to open her up, otherwise, she is a pathetic, empty human. An egregious example I can think of right now is Julia Louis-Dreyfus’ character, Margo, in National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation (1989). I watched it a few years back. To the shock of no one, I did not think it was good.
While Erin Keane4 has more fond memories of the movie, she also notes that the character of Margo and her husband are treated unfairly by the narrative:
“Clark is the quintessential family man, obsessed with creating a magical holiday for his family as an exercise in asserting his manhood. He wants to be recognized as the big-shot king of Christmas. Seen through that lens, Todd, with no children to wow with holiday light displays and a partner who appears to be his equal professionally and personally, is an emasculated joke, a wimp who won’t risk getting his hands dirty by confronting his volatile neighbor.
But Margo is even more despised by the film — she’s not selfless or warm or feminine enough to be the equal of Ellen ‘Oh, Sparky!’ Griswold, long-suffering MILF extraordinaire — and so she ends up more often as the butt of humiliating gags.”
Just when you think the media is evolving, that we are moving past this dislike of career women, that we are writing and evolving how we depict women in general, the lousy discourse rears its ugly head. Now we throw the term Girlboss at any woman for having a career and doing something with it.
The discourse is disguised as progressivism but is no different from what Phyllis Schlafly would spew.
Girlboss was thrown at Nancy Pelosi because she doesn’t have a magic wand to do the things that bad Twitter takes say she is supposed to do. Never mind that it is not how politics works. Girlboss was thrown at a woman I follow on social media because she decided to set up an Airbnb to make some extra money. Girlboss is thrown at the woman who becomes a tech startup leader because apparently, all women in tech are now Elizabeth Holmes5. Girlboss is for the woman who wants to dedicate her time to her professional career and desires no spouse or children. Girlboss is thrown for the woman doing overtime because somehow it’s her fault that America has a terrible work culture.
Girlboss is thrown around now for any ambitious woman. We have never evolved from this idea that a woman showing ambition is somehow evil. We have never looked inside of ourselves and ask questions such as, why am I so hostile to a woman for thinking about moving up in work?
If you cannot call a woman a terrible person without referencing her gender, perhaps you should reflect on why you have an issue with her in the first place.
I have witnessed underqualified men be promoted over excellent women employees. I have heard of women being lambasted for saying something that a man gets rewarded for saying. There are women whose reputations at work are tattered because they spoke up, refusing any indignity tossed at them.
A shitty boss is a shitty boss, no matter the gender. Believe me, I was once under the torment of two women that were my bosses. I wouldn’t call them girlbosses. They were just shitty, bullying, racist, manipulative bosses. They disliked me because they disliked any ambitious woman. They were afraid of a woman desiring better pay, leadership opportunities, and promotion.
Honestly, they probably thought I was a girlboss.
All in all, when you call out a woman for her actions, you call out her actions, not her gender.
If you insist on calling a woman a girlboss for being terrible, it is not a far leap to think that someone will call a woman that same term just because they personally dislike her. You put a magnifying glass on a woman for being a woman and, suddenly, every action and every word she says that you dislike, you align it to her gender, not her personality.
You are not as progressive as you think you are when you dress and stack up misogyny in a trenchcoat of wokeness.
A shitty boss is a shitty boss.
How about we highlight their actions instead of their gender?
Mull, Amanda. “The Girlboss Has Left the Building.” The Atlantic.
Sreenivas, Dhaaruni. “Dhaaruni IRL.” Substack.
Siegel, Tatiana. “‘Everyone Just Knows He’s an Absolute Monster’: Scott Rudin’s Ex-Staffers Speak Out on Abusive Behavior.” The Hollywood Reporter.