‘Girlboss’ used to suggest a kind of role model. How did it become a sexist putdown? | Martha Gill

What’s the difference between a girl boss and a career woman? The simplest answer, perhaps, is time. Once it was the term “career woman” that translated female ambition as selfish, immoral and slightly ridiculous; now, “girl boss” does the job. The morals in question have changed. The effect is the same.

You may not have heard the word. It traces the rise and fall of a particular movement in feminism. Girlboss originated around 2014 as an approving description of the type of success epitomized by Sheryl Sandberg’s “lean in” approach. It cheered on the rugged individualist making it in a man’s world through “moxie” and “hustle”.

Then, as leaning in went out of fashion, around 2019, feminists changed their minds. Girlboss became an insult, used to belittle and accuse a type of manicured woman who pursues success at the expense of others. The founder of The Wing, a “feminist” workspace business that turned out to be riddled with toxic practices, is a girlboss. Elizabeth Holmes, the fraudulent CEO of Theranos, is perhaps the quintessential girlboss.

The strength and scale of the backlash is such that it is still going three years later. There is a current Edinburgh show called Gaslight, Gatekeep, Girlboss and a forthcoming book by the same name. There is a fad for girlboss villains on screen: unfeminist Shiv Roy in Succession (“What were you doing, brunching with some other sock-puppet girlboss presidents?” her brother Roman mocks her at one point); the psychopathic but well-dressed heroine of the film I Care a Lot.

We should note that there is some merit to the backlash against girl bosses and the wider “lean in” project. It at least started with a good observation. Feminists correctly pointed out that a few women learning how to climb the ranks at the top of the corporate world doesn’t solve the big structural problems of patriarchy. There is far more to do.

But this general observation soon grew into something more target-specific, which is where it started to go wrong. Girlbosses themselves – successful or ambitious women, in other words – became objects of hate. It was noted that they were not always feminists, although they tended to say they were, and that they were not always “good” or “nice”. Even worse, like men, they had the temerity to want success in systems and workplaces that weren’t fair to everyone and yet, like men, sometimes showed little interest in solving these wider problems.

Bad female CEOs, such as Holmes, started to be seen not merely as bad people but as a reflection on the whole idea of ​​championing women in business. Soon, girlboss was a reputable insult that could be directed at any entitled-seeming woman with ambitions in the corporate world or who had a particular aesthetic (suit, heels, manicure). That mission creep feels familiar. The derogatory term “Karen” once usefully described a particular type of racist white woman but can now be freely directed at any middle-aged woman with a particular haircut.

To address the distasteful problem of overconfident or entitled women, the girlboss took on a ridiculing quality too: these women did not have as much power as they thought (after all, how could a woman really have power in a man’s world?). They were not self-made as they claimed, they were unwitting products of “benevolent sexism”.

The feminist writer Moira Donegan has pointed out that the trajectory of the girlboss has similarities with the phenomenon chronicled by Susan Faludi in Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women – the demonization of career women as lonely, unhappy and unlikely to get married. (Men, we should remind ourselves, are not ridiculed as “boybosses”.)

What happened here is that what started as a feminist observation has overthought itself into old-fashioned misogyny. The idea that women deserve success only if they are also good, kind, nurturing people who put everyone else first is, of course, a sexist one. No other group fighting for civil rights is tasked with ensuring all other groups have civil rights first – that would be a recipe for no progress at all. Deaf people who achieve success in the workplace against the odds do not tend to be lambasted for neglecting the cause of the blind.

It would be nice if every woman who achieved success were a paragon of sisterly virtue. But is it really hypocritical or immoral to be a member of an oppressed group and care only about your own success? Follow the logic and the only group with no obligations at all is the one with no experience of oppression – rich white men. Surely success for even one woman should be counted as a (very small) feminist victory.

What happened to the girl boss is symbolic of a clash between two strands of feminist thinking that run through the movement. Should you try to change society or should you help women navigate society as it is? Take, for example, the perennial issue of whether police should warn women not to drink too much on nights out or go down dark alleys alone. Many feminists object to this as victim-blaming and failing to address the real problem: violent men. But some, such as Louise Perry, make the point that these warnings are nonetheless vital. Violent men do exist and neglecting to warn women of these dangers would be a failure of feminism.

The answer to the conundrum is that you need both. Push for change and help women in an imperfect world. Address male violence and warn women, too. Push for change in workplaces and celebrate women who succeed anyway. They are not incompatible.