The Problem with Girl Boss Feminism

We’ve all seen the term “girl boss” before, printed across a bright pink Forever 21 crop top, or perhaps in a pastel-themed infographic that someone posted on their Instagram story. Since entrepreneur Sophia Amoruso popularized the term in 2014, this specific idea of the corporate, modern woman was launched into the public consciousness and has persisted.

At the time, “girl boss” was a term that called for a defiantly female and feminine rebellion against patriarchal forces that kept women out of the workforce and places of power. In the past, it was common for women to de-feminize themselves or present themselves as masculine in order to gain respect from their male coworkers, which was essential in climbing the corporate ladder. But girl boss feminism proposed that women shouldn’t need to act masculine to gain male approval, and that they should feel comfortable expressing themselves the way they see fit. 

It sounds like a great message, but language is fluid and so are definitions. What might once have been an empowering hashtag or slogan became a wide-spread phenomenon that many feminists adopted as a rallying cry against the patriarchal forces keeping them from having a career of their own. The message gradually became a call for women in power: CEOs, bosses, and  Which is something that many women do strive for. But it became less about the position of power, or the character of the person who was filling it, and more about the gender that the person identified as.

I love seeing women succeed as much as the next feminist, but celebrating someone in a position of power for simply being a woman—with no regard for her qualifications or intelligence—becomes less about feminism, and more about filling a quota. For example, the editor-in-chief of The Sun being a woman does not make the publication any less racist or inflammatory, just as Amazon’s Senior Vice President of Human Resources being a woman doesn’t make the company any less exploitative. All of these powerful, eminent figures being women does not mean that their success should be blindly celebrated. This is a superficial shortcut to make, and one that ignores two simple things. 

First of all, hailing girl bosses as feminist role-models on the basis of their gender makes it very easy for them to evade accountability. Usually, the girl bosses’ beliefs, convictions, or actions are hardly looked at with skepticism, because what she stands for is considered to be more important than who she is. Such focus on an individual, successful woman also allows the oppressive institutions in which she works to avoid accountability, emboldened by their ability to point at the one woman in their employ and pride themselves on their diversity. A number of companies engaged in virtue signalling—the practice of publicly expressing politically correct opinions that are not then reflected in the actions of said company—have been able to use the girl boss movement as a way to fall into the good graces of the general public by designing empowerment campaigns or selectively placing a few women in positions of power, when in reality, they refuse to tackle structural and systematic issues within the company that affect all of the women trying to climb the corporate ladder. 

Additionally, girl boss campaigns undermine feminism by celebrating women in power for their gender rather than their accomplishments. They diminish women down to something as uncontrollable and innate as the fact that they are female, celebrating a girl bosses’ success as desirable without examining the individual herself. Feminism is therefore reformulated into an endeavour with surface-level aims for corporate success, defining  a woman’s ability to be respected and valued on her financial prosperity and attainment of power. It strips women of their individual success, turning us into a monolith. Women are not coalescent, and the success of one is not indicative of the success of all. The fact that one woman has managed to maneuver herself to the top of a field primarily dominated by men does not mean that this field is now a female-friendly space. By removing feminism’s collectivity and rebranding its goals as one woman’s rise to power rather than the liberation of every woman, the movement is then hollowed out and made more palatable, easier to commercialize, and a meaningless husk of what it used to be. 

Sadly, this is what the girlboss movement has become since its conception in 2014. It is now a symbol of performative feminism, choosing to define successful women only by their gender, and adopting their successes as inherently feminist and progressive. The extent to which one woman's accomplishments can be indicative of the success of an entire group, and the way in which we seem to worship powerful women without truly taking the time to scrutinize their character, must not be overstated.