Unpacking #Girlboss & “Lean In”: One Woman’s Stallion, Another’s Trojan Horse
“We need more girlboss war criminals,” a woman joked at an open mic night I recently attended. “Too many arms dealers are men.”
The whole audience, myself included, split into laughter — the unanimity of which surprised me a little. “Perhaps some more female embezzlers, too,” she added. “That would be very girlboss indeed.”
The punchline poked at the corporate feminist movement and the fact that a subsection of that movement has self-conglomerated under the term “girlboss.” The bit was an exaggeration, of course, but it made a point: there’s a valid concern with wanting to have more women in powerful roles, but, at times, an almost comical lack of concern regarding what these women actually do.
The hashtag #Girlboss has been used more than 17 million times on Instagram alone, outpacing tags like #BlackLivesMatter (8 million) and #MeToo (2 million)*. Many of the pictures are inspirational, inoffensive, pastel: quotes like, I’m not bossy, I’m the boss, and snapshots of women posing in business casual. (Like anything on the internet involving women, there’s facetious parody, too).
Instagram hashtags, of course, aren’t a reliable metric for what’s important to the general public. And these numbers differ on platforms like Twitter (where exact counts are more difficult to track down). But the sustained traction of the term speaks to an increasingly popular idea in mainstream feminism, one in which empowerment and capital are conflated — and trendy.
At age 16, with no interest in Silicon Valley, no interest in finance, and remarkably little interest in reading, I somehow found myself tearing through a borrowed copy of Lean In — a corporate feminist manifesto of sorts by Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg. It was my junior year of high school and I was reading about parking spots for pregnant people at Fortune 500 companies, feeling enlightened even though the only “negotiation” I would undergo (and lose) at that age would be one where I tried to get free transportation to prom.
In the time since its publication, the lessons in Lean In have been criticized and deconstructed, undermined by their own orientation towards a relatively narrow, privileged category of women, and selectly recanted by Sandberg herself after years of reflection. Most (if not all) of the nuance in the book went over my head when I first read it. A certain amount of nuance that should have been in the book, I would later realize, never existed.
And still, while I was reading it, much of Sandberg’s story struck me as subversive. At the time, I was living in Virginia, going to a high school where people weren’t hostile towards feminist ideas, but were still largely indifferent towards them. I wasn’t particularly concerned with what Sandberg did at her job, or how she leveraged her power to change company policy. Instead, my primary focus was on what she had overcome — which in itself seemed revolutionary to me.
Lean In was published in 2013, and quickly cemented itself in the greater girlboss canon. The book, targeted towards women looking to climb the corporate ladder, gave concrete vocabulary to a movement that had, until then, lacked a cohesive catch phrase or figurehead.
Finally, there it was, a call-to-action: lean in—in meetings, negotiations, life choices—and essentially don’t be the person standing in your own way. Gradually, this advice became the subject of broad criticism. While on tour for her own book, Becoming, former First Lady Michelle Obama challenged the motto: “It’s not always enough to lean in,” she said candidly, “because that shit doesn’t work.”
Still, much of its initial reception was unconcerned fanfare. A New York Times book review lauded Sandberg as a “feminist champion." An NPR review contained mild criticism but still ultimately categorized the book as “a win for women.” Six years later, the score remains contested.
About a year after Lean In was published, #Girlboss followed and was marketed to a younger audience of women. Author and Nasty Gal CEO Sophia Amoruso — who the Washington Post called “anti-capitalist” in an article that described her book as “Lean In for misfits” — offered a scrappier, messier success story that resonated enough with young women to sell hundreds of thousands of copies containing what was more or less a similar message. The tone was younger and more casual, but the emphasis in #Girlboss, like Lean In, was on economic freedom, being your own boss, and hustling to get to the top.
It’s important to note that these movements didn’t emerge out of thin air, and definitely weren’t popularized in a vacuum.
In the U.S., there’s a particularly thorny link between freedom and capital, and for too many women, that link is intensified by other factors. Money often makes the difference between a woman being able to leave an abusive home and having to stay, and in staggering but unsurprising numbers, domestic abuse is coupled with financial abuse. Despite unprecedented medical advances, the gap in life expectancy between the country’s poorest and the richest women actually continues to widen. And the rates are even more significant for women of color, especially black Trans* women.
So it feels natural that we would associate money with agency, and safety with power, because in a literal sense these relationships exist. For women, especially, these intersections can be intimate and urgent. In a world where anxiety about money is so pervasive and complex, it makes sense that women are rallying around movements that often boil down to commercial objectives thinly veiled with feminist lingo.
At the same time, most people can see that the missions of corporate feminism aren’t those driving the front lines of structural, progressive change. The $40 “Girlboss” tote bag often does very little for, say, the women who may have worked to assemble it. Rather, these types of items are often relatively unimpactful symbols of a movement only tangentially related to ongoing fights for substantive changes like paid maternity leave, or better medical care for women living in poverty.
Corporate feminism, as it’s understood today, is hollow if unaccompanied by a real commitment to structural change. Promotion alone isn’t enough because the unfortunate reality is that women in powerful roles can, of course, also uphold policies that ultimately hurt other women.
Sophia Amaruso’s company, Nasty Gal, was sued shortly after the publication of her book when it laid off several employees right before their planned maternity leaves. (The retailer responded to the controversy, claiming that the lawsuits were “frivolous and without merit.”) Regardless, pregnancy discrimination is a pressing issue in the U.S., impacting women at some of the nation’s largest companies, across every industry. Stories like Amaruso’s bolster the criticism that there’s an individual emphasis to corporate female empowerment, and a flimsy return for the women in most dire need of support. In her book, Trick Mirror, Jia Tolentino writes, “Feminism that prioritizes the individual will always, at its core, be at odds with feminism that prioritizes the collective.”
But then there are women like Susan Wojcicki, CEO of YouTube, who has advocated for progressive paid maternity leave policies at her company and beyond. Or Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who ended the practice of hiring unpaid interns in her office, halting a norm that has long advantaged wealthier applicants. Men can enact these types of changes, too, and many do. But women often have a more intimate perspective on the urgency of doing so.
Women in power positions can redistribute that power back to the collective; it’s just worth remembering that getting them there shouldn’t be the sole priority.
The genius of the term Girlboss, and perhaps the danger, lies partly in its simplicity. Situated in a broad, aspirational mindset, female power is commendable in part because it is unique, and unpunishable because it is rare. The Girlboss, whoever she is, is a faceless, nameless woman, anonymous, untouchable, and inspiring. She could be a role model, or she could be you — and this is a kind of alluring notion whether you’re a sixteen-year-old high school student looking to feel empowered, or a working woman looking to feel seen.
Categorically looking down on women who call themselves girlbosses feels lazy to me. But so does co-signing their whole operation. The reality is that massive companies will continue to exist regardless of who runs them, and often, when women run them, they’re better for the female employees who don’t. But all of the campaigning around titles and promotions and “getting yours” makes me nervous about how easy it has become for us to go on autopilot, focusing on getting women to the top while forgetting about what they do when they get there. (and, more importantly, forgetting about all of the other women who work below them).
The fight for more female success in the corporate realm isn’t wrong — it’s just insufficient. And, perhaps at times, shouts over the voices it should be listening to most.
*At the time of publication
About the Author
Jacque Groskaufmanis (she/her) is a recent graduate from Cornell University. She’s written on a broad range of topics: from the often-unspoken complexities involved in choosing a birth control option, to the lack of regulation among social media influencers. A Virginia native, Jacque currently lives, works, and enjoys sesame buns in Brooklyn, NY. You can check out her other work on her website.