Death of the girlboss
girl·boss /noun An ambitious, successful woman with an enviable career. Often (but not always) an entrepreneur or self-employed in some capacity. Highly driven and impossibly well-groomed. Probably younger than you.
Somewhere around the mid-2010s, as we collectively pieced together our post-recession existences and began to succumb to social media’s poisonous embrace, entrepreneurship got itself a makeover. In the space of a few short years, a career path I’d never before contemplated suddenly exploded into my consciousness. The word ‘entrepreneur’ stopped being synonymous solely with grey-suited businessmen like Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, people with personal fortunes that read more like the GDP of a small country and who might as well have lived on the moon for all the relevance they had to my life.
All of a sudden, it felt as if entrepreneurs were everywhere, and they were actually kind of … cool. Running a startup was Cool. Closing a funding round was Cool. Selling your business to another bigger business and using the proceeds from that sale to start a new business? Very Cool. Startup founders routinely began to ascend to a level of celebrity previously reserved for members of the glamour professions, their lifestyles commanding a similar cultural fascination to those of movie stars and models. The aspiration du jour for much of my generation was to be the next baby-faced CEO on the cover of Forbes magazine, or at the very least to work for ourselves.
Out of this cultural moment came the Girlboss, the result of startup culture being refracted through the prism of fourth-wave feminism that was at the time also gathering pace. The term ‘girlboss’ itself was first propelled into public consciousness by American entrepreneur Sophia Amoruso, founder and former CEO of fast fashion brand Nasty Gal, who in 2014 published a memoir-slash-business manual called A somewhat self-mythologising account of Amoruso’s rags-to-riches trajectory, told the story of a dumpster-diving community, sporting a blunt fringe and leather biker jackets, and giving unvarnished interviews about ‘getting shit done’. Her origin story presented a refreshingly counterculture alternative to the corporate narratives peddled by other female business icons, and her message – ‘if a sofa-surfing college dropout can do this, then so can you’ – took. At present the #girlboss hashtag has been used more than 22 million times on Instagram alone, with the book itself selling more than half a million copies to date.
