The Waning of the 'Girl Boss' Era
Image: Unsplash
Being a “Girl Boss” is no longer cool. However, the question actually is: was it ever really cool? Urban Dictionary has a few competing definitions of the term ‘Girl Boss’/ ‘Girlboss.’ One definition listed mentions ‘Girl Boss’ to be “[s]omeone with badass energy all around. Doesn’t care what anyone says. Someone who is strong and confident. Someone who everyone looks up to.” While this definition is an accurate depiction of what the term meant during the surge in women-owned businesses during the mid to late 2010s. However, another definition, also on Urban Dictionary, captures slightly what the term now holds in meaning: “Girlboss (noun) someone who is lauded as being a feminist icon, despite the fact that they are actually extremely unpleasant or ‘unfeminist’. The former description accurately captures the intial popularity of the term and brings into context the extremely surface level understanding of inclusive workplaces that took off during the mid 2010s. For women to own businesses and take up the coveted role of a CEO cultivated a conversation about what it meant for women to break glass ceilings. However, the latter description points to what the term and those who used it to describe themselves or others always was: representation politics at its best. Replacing white men at the top with white women didn’t necessarily change the ways in which the companies any better. In fact it maintained a lot of the strucures and practices that continued to place racialized people in unsafe workplaces.
The term 'Girl Boss,' made popular during the mid to late 2010s, now has an entirely different meaning. The reason for the era's downfall: upholding systems of oppression. Recently, thanks to the social media apps and people’s ability to now share critique and knowledge in short sound bites, the term ‘Girl Boss’ now feelings cringeworthy, and those hear others use the term often end up feeling second hand embarrassment. Around the 2020 US elections, folks online equated the word to the now VP Kamala Harris, pointing to her speaking about putting Black and racialized parents in jail among other hyper pro-state agenda speaking points her campaign unveiled.
Let’s take a step back and revisit the ‘Girl Boss’ era for just a second. The era, while some might argue had its intentions in the right place, did not give space to racialized communities, particularly racialized women and queer folks. “I remember this era, this burning need to accomplish things that I most definitely, without any support, probably could not achieve. A lot of time we don’t realize that these girlbosses were already doing well. They were trust fund babies or simply didn’t even have school debt to pay off. For the rest of us, who don’t have a large sum of money to fall back on and tons of debt from school and other financial barriers, don’t have necessarily take the same paths to success. However you want to define success,” said Karthi*, a 28 year old teacher in Toronto.
