The molds of female empowerment have changed before our eyes for decades. With each wave of feminism and women-centric trend, there is increasing momentum around raising and appreciating strong women. Earlier this month, we celebrated International Women’s Day (IWD) – a day in which we marvel at the strong women in our lives and reflect on the years when these women were silenced. This year, my IWD Instagram feed was flooded by the word, “girlboss.” My friends and I unironically label each other girlbosses all the time, meant to be a form of praise and empowerment. But what does it really mean to girl-boss?
Coined in 2014, “girlboss” is a term meant for the rise of female CEOs in notable companies. It immediately became the feminist mask that hustle-culture needed to become aspirational: if you work hard enough as a woman, you will climb the corporate ladder and create room for other women to do the same. As empowering as this sounds, this take on girlbossing received backlash in its early days. Girlbosses were the CEOs, but how does one really get there? We cannot ignore the privilege behind education, whiteness, and other factors that put some women ahead of others. Not to say that these women CEOs are not intelligent and strong, we just cannot equate such qualities – the one’s that “girlbossing” represents – to only these women, because they are far from the majority. The dangers and rather ignorance of “girlboss” in the corporate context were caught, but what about the colloquial use of the word and its prominence in popular culture?
I still hear girlboss thrown around to validate the hustle-and-bustle lifestyle, which many of us can agree is not always healthy. In high school, I saw the dangers of toxic productivity. My same-sex, academically rigorous school was competitive, to say the least. If you were able to successfully stomach a lunch during the school day, if you were able to make it through the week without a cry in the grad lounge, you were not working hard enough, and you were surely not a girlboss. What made this mindset so exhausting was how it was built upon comparison: comparing yourself to how the other girls were studying, comparing your marks to theirs, and comparing every aspect of yourself to what ‘productivity’ was framed to look like. While not everyone who thrives on hustle-culture experiences this, it is no secret that toxic productivity thrives on comparison and cycles of self-deprecation. Focusing on being a girlboss from this perspective not only makes us feel that we are not doing enough – not involved in enough clubs, not advancing in your career, etc – it can make us feel that we are not enough.
Jealousy is a normal emotion and one that we cannot always escape; however, to establish true female empowerment, shouldn’t we feel empowered to exist how we are, without scrambling to replicate an idealistic sense of productivity and success? The subconscious comparison that “girlboss” demands makes this quite difficult. Many of us have had friends lash out on us, and our parents or mentors tell us it is out of jealousy – they want something that you have, and they cannot fathom why they can’t have it themselves, so they choose to tear you down. This is quite the opposite of women supporting women, but is an unfortunate cycle that many women experience at all stages of life. Sure, the term “girlboss” is not the sole perpetrator of comparison-based meanness, but toxic implications of the word certainly do not help.
And, what about comparison across genders? The word itself, “girlboss,” suggests that a normal boss is, in fact, not a girl; it demands that we soften the prominent “boss” term with the delicacy of the word “girl.” So, beyond comparing women to other women, “girlboss” makes us compare our success to that of a man. This is positive in the sense that it asks us to reflect on equal opportunities across genders. But consider this example. Every week, my house appoints a “girlboss of the week” – if you demonstrate success or strength in some way, you earn the title, essentially based on how hard you girlboss-ed that week. One week, a point was awarded for shovelling the snow outside our house, calling it “man’s work.” Undoubtedly, we should praise women for challenging gender roles and demonstrating strength in ways that are falsely labelled “masculine” – so long as such actions are authentic to whoever is performing them. In a way, “girlboss” positions masculinity as something to juxtapose, but what is the point in this comparison?
We should praise women for honouring their lives in ways that are authentic to them, and this praise should not solely be built on the back of comparison. While defying gender stereotypes is great, we should empower women by practicing things that make them themselves. The ideal in 2014 was that when a ‘girlboss’ succeeds we are all supposed to feel the success; however, it is not a win when women are bringing each other down, or when women feel they cannot live their truth because it doesn’t fit the typical definition of a girlboss. I do not think that we should abandon the word – I do think that it stands to recognize strong women. But I urge you to realize that toxic productivity, or anything that another woman or man is doing that feels unauthentic to you, is not how you achieve girlboss status. It is by honouring what makes us, as women, ourselves.
