The death of the girlboss

As a feminist activist that also has been working in corporate for a long time, I have seen the raising of the 'girlboss' and neoliberal feminism in the workplace. In the beginning, I didn’t really grasp the concept and I was genuinely happy about more and more women getting interested in feminism.

But the girlboss is one of the cruellest tricks capitalism ever perpetrated. Born in the mid-2010s. What set girl bosses apart from regular bosses was pinning feminists to hustle. As Alexandra Solomon, a professor who specializes in gender and gender roles at Northwestern University said “when you look at the actual word ‘girlboss,’ there may be some internalised sexism.

Research shows that as women get older, and as women become more powerful, they are perceived as less likeable. So by using that term girlboss, there’s a desire to be powerful but a fear of losing likability”.

In the girlboss world, power and money became measures of equality and rising to power in a capitalist system. But mythologizing the girlboss didn’t last very long.

In 2015, Amoruso’s Nasty Gal became the subject of a discrimination lawsuit alleging it had illegally fired pregnant employees. Employees came forward with stories about how Amoruso’s company was a toxic workplace.

In 2019, The Verge reported on Away employees’ allegations that co-founder and co-CEO Steph Korey bullied employees, and that the company wasn’t as inclusive or diverse as it had claimed.

In 2020, former employees of feminist oasis the Wing said the coworking and social space created was only for show, and that working there was an exercise in being undermined. They also alleged that Black and brown employees were mistreated. The Wing founder Audrey Gelman stepped down that June.

As more and more of these stories surfaced, “girlboss” shifted culturally from a noun to a verb, one that described the sinister process of capitalist success and hollow female empowerment. On TikTok and Twitter, girlboss the verb became yoked to “gaslight” and “gatekeep” to create a kind of “live, laugh, love” of toxic, usually white feminism.

So it’s not that people wanted the girlboss to fail; it’s the opposite. The concept of the girlboss failed us all.

Neoliberal Feminism - How bad is it for feminism and all women

When Feminism enters the mainstream, it doesn’t automatically lose its meaning or its appeal. What matters is the way it is discussed and whether or not that discussion challenges or affirms the status quo. But how often have articles about feminism in the mainstream media or publications inspired revolt? NONE

So why neoliberal feminism is bad for feminism and for ALL women? The contemporary role of “boss girl feminism” is driving many discussions that clash with a radical and critical vision of feminism. As Lola Olufemi says in her book “ Feminism, Interrupted”.

“Neoliberal feminism referees to the impositions of cultural and economic policies and practices that have resulted in the extraction and redistribution of public resources from the working class upwards, decimated infrastructures of social care through austerity measures, privatise welfare state and individualised the ways we relate to another”.

For the neoliberal model of feminism, inequality is a state that can be overcome in corporate environments without overhauling the system. As in the Gattopardo, a very fascinating book by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa that chronicles the changes in Sicilian life and society during the Risorgimento, everything changes and nothing changes.

Neoliberal feminism centralises individual and personal choices, misguidedly images that the state can grant liberation by protecting the free market and fails to question the connection between capitalism, race and gender oppression.

This feminist model is appealing to those who have limited knowledge of the radical history of feminism and the gain fought and won by activists who dared to demand what was once impossible.

In fact, white feminist neo-liberal politics focuses on the self as a vehicle of self-improvement and personal gain at the expense of others. In the corporate environment, they teach us to “lean in” into a capitalist society where power is equal to financial gain. Obviously, this model works better for wealthy women, who are able to replace men in a capital structure.

The neoliberal feminism is just obsessed with “having women to the top” in which everything remain intact. It invisibilises the women of colour, low paid workers and migrant women who must suffer so that the ‘others’ ( generally white wealthy women) can succeed.

Exploitation becomes a natural part of ‘others’ achievements. There is no challenge to hegemony, no challenge to the structure of power and to the status quo!

Refusing neoliberal feminism is my personal feminist process and it is opening a new world where ‘feminism’ means more than ‘women’ or ‘equality.’

Feminist work is justice work and I found this approach crucial to a revolutionary work because it means that nobody is left behind.