What actually happened to the girlboss?

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1:53Grace Beverley: What is up? I'm Grace Beverly and welcome back to Working Hard, the podcast-shaped guidebook on how to improve your own life and achieve what you actually dreamed of doing, because life's too short for boring podcasts and bad advice.

2:07Grace Beverley: What is up and welcome back to another bonus episode of Working Hard. I feel like we have not had bonus episodes for a while and that is fully on me. It is due to the fact that I am, in case you can't hear from my like dramatic acid reflux and how insufferable I've been about it on social media I'm pregnant and I've been working so hard to prepare for mat leave to set everything up within the businesses to get I don't know also prepare for a baby and doing a renovation at the same time all of the yada yada world's tiniest violin but I feel like since the beginning of pregnancy because you're so sick at the beginning for so long honestly like the best way I can describe it is like you've been on a night out till 6am and drunk loads and then you have to be at work at 8 like that's the best way I can describe it it's like violent hangover feeling even if you're not vomiting like the nausea is like so debilitating and then you're also exhausted but I feel like since that point it's been about surviving not thriving on top of the anxiety and everything around the pregnancy and like what I'd had happened before and the sickness and all of these different things I kind of just wanted to be like look you don't need to do everything you don't need to do everything all at once you can stop some things even if you said you're going to do a bonus episode every two weeks so that is my very long sob story explanation for why we haven't been doing bonus episodes all the time obviously we've stuck to some of them obviously we've stuck to the full podcast um and I'm really proud of how much has been able to be kept up through all of that because it's been a lot but I came across this article in Vogue a few months ago and I wrote down that I really wanted to do a episode on it because I feel like it's such a I don't know I feel like the article itself was really well structured and a really good rundown and definitely in the area and the realm of things we like to talk about but also that it's just like a good thing to know the background of and I think a lot of people really steer clear of this topic because basically I mean I don't know why I'm being so vague but the article was about whether the girl boss era was making a comeback and I think a lot of women and I've definitely felt this in the past like steer clear of ever talking about this purely because if you are a woman who works it instantly looks like you are trying to fit the like girl boss narrative like you can't do anything with your life as a woman without trying to be like all girl boss feminism which is problematic in itself because it's like okay so i have to only do certain things otherwise i'm perpetuating a harmful narrative despite the fact that like every time a man has a job they're not perpetuating man boss narrative.

4:41Grace Beverley: Anyway, a whole rant for another day. But this article really got me thinking because I feel like we all lived through this era. I personally lived through this era when I was quite young. Like, I think I wasn't really able to analyse it, to tap into it, to work out like what different stories were being sold. Like, we watched it rise, we watched it fall. I don't think I'd truly, until I like read about it later on, taken the time or space to examine what's behind it. And I think that was because A, I was so young, like I think I was in school at the time of the girl boss era kind of being about, but also I think we carry so much internalised misogyny for so much of our lives.

5:22Grace Beverley: And I think that it means that sometimes we kind of buy certain narratives as just the way things are until we maybe examine them later or until we see other people examining them later. That's why I always really, really recommend the book Trick Mirror by Gia Tolentino. Oh, honestly, it's just the best nonfiction book I've ever read. And it's really easy to dip into and everything. But basically, it's really poignant analysis on like public affair type things and like reality TV and the self optimization of women and all of this. And I think that so many of these public things are so easy to be spoon fed.

5:57Grace Beverley: And to just take in until you maybe see someone else be like oh this is a bit problematic and this is why. Anyway in this episode I really want to I guess use that article to break down the girlboss era in three parts. First what was actually going on during the girlboss era so like beyond the headlines what was actually happening. Then second why it ended up collapsing and where that blame of the system that the media kind of built went. And third what's replaced it and what that shift says about how we define success now because I feel like the article really showed us that the narrative we've been told about the girl boss is probably a lot simpler than the nuanced reality of it and I'm going to go into some caveats in a second on this but I do think that as I said things like girl boss feminism can be incredibly harmful but then on the other side can also be used as sticks with which to like beat the women who then try and do anything like you're damned if you do you're damned if you don't you're damned if you try and reach a certain level you're damned if you don't try and reach a certain level because that's what people fought for and I think that all of this like it kind of goes around in cycles but as I said before we get into it I want to make a really important distinction because I think this is where a lot of the conversation gets blurred and also where a lot of people are terrified of talking about this conversation particularly because as I've said if you are a woman and you are I don't know self-employed or have a company or whatever you automatically look like you're trying to be a girl boss rather than just trying to be a woman who has that job and I think there are some really important distinctions here so when we talk about the girl boss era which spanned the 2010s we're potentially talking about two different things which I think is where it gets a bit nuanced and foggy on the one side you have these like girl boss founders so this actually originated from like the Sophia Amoruso girl boss book I believe that was the first time it was like mainstream mentioned.

7:51Grace Beverley: And this was generally like women who built companies, often in really high pressure venture backed environments, and were turned into symbols of ambition, partly through their own work and partly through the fact that that was really what sold in the media at the time. So they were very much like put up on a pedestal. And then on the other side, you have girlboss feminism. So girlboss feminism is essentially the idea that success alone, particularly corporate or financial success is inherently feminist so because someone is successful and they are a woman that is inevitably a good because of the power dynamics we've seen in the past and i think one of the biggest criticisms of the girl boss era and rightly so is that it often centered on a very specific type of success so this was often built within systems that still relied on exploitation inequality unsustainable working conditions all of these different things and that cannot be argued to be an inherent good just because it is a woman doing it so i think just to be really clear before we get into this this episode isn't a defense of girlboss feminism or agreeing with girlboss feminism or ignoring the very real criticisms of some of the people and companies involved because i do think it's really important that in the same way that like elizabeth holmes the person who founded theranos and then was involved in that and now is in jail for obviously mass fraud like she doesn't represent all female founders and to say she does would be really really harmful at the same time is that like as I've said just because you were doing something like a certain type of job it doesn't mean that you believe in girlboss feminism otherwise a woman could never run a company without it being seen as a perpetuation of something problematic which in itself is problematic but I also think there's something really interesting in how quickly the cultural narrative shifted because what started as a conversation around like a handful of founders at the time back then eventually became a conversation about female ambition itself and that's really the part I want to unpack.

9:44Grace Beverley: Not whether every founder was good or bad. I'm not aiming to like judge or absolve or anything like that. That's not what this episode is on. That would be an entirely different deep dive but kind of why these women became such huge symbols in the first place. Like why we attached so much meaning to these specific women who were all doing very similar things and perhaps looked very similar and were from very similar backgrounds but also how that now fits into how the conversation around girlbosses or the girlboss has shifted in the past few months. So the headline of the article, the one that I read, was is the girlboss making a comeback?

10:19Grace Beverley: And it was written by Amy Francom and it looks at how some of the original founders from that era are re-emerging and whether we are entering a new version of that. What I found really interesting is the underlying argument which is that we've completely misunderstood that era and the structures that were in place at that time and this is something I've seen a little bit of literature about within the past 10 years but I thought the way it looked at it within this article was really interesting. Secondly I found really interesting the fact that the article really argues that despite good intentions a lot of these businesses were built within a system that rewarded speed over maintainable growth, visibility over infrastructure and the founders were expected to carry all of that publicly and I think that the reason they were expected to cover all of that publicly was because it was working so well in the media like if you have a silver bullet you're going to use that silver bullet if you have something that really works for the business you're going to use that but what I also think happened then is these founders were put in a position where actually male founders almost never are when actually you're chastised because the whole business relies on you but at the same time you're used and like put on this pedestal and told that you're the face of it rather than just starting a business that you want to start and you want to grow.

11:30Grace Beverley: Then what she also said within this article is that when things started to crack whether that was like funding slowing or business models struggling or internal issues coming to light the focus wasn't then on the businesses themselves. Every time there was a negative the focus shifted very much into the individuals at the centre of it. And again, I think that different situations within this whole era had different reasonings for that. And I think some of them were very well justified. Like, I think that some of them you can see, like, cold hard proof that certain things should not have happened.

12:05Grace Beverley: I think on the other side, there were some examples where these people were essentially put up on this massive pedestal in front of the entire world and told, like, they're this, they're this they're this they're a symbol of this this and this and the second things didn't work out which often is the case in businesses like we know that the majority of startups fail then that was like a personal failing in a way that actually I don't think you ever see with male founders like there are serial male founders that raise again and again and again and sometimes the ideas work and sometimes they don't work and it does seem that the blame of that is often placed on market conditions or the business model or trying something really new and daring and amazing versus the blame almost always with the female founders is on the individual.

12:53Grace Beverley: Then all of this obviously led to the fall of the girl boss which was where I saw a lot of founders basically publicly shamed either for the business failure or personal failures and as I've said there were different levels of that. I think some of them were incredibly unfair and it was kind of to girls situation and I think some of them were justified but at its peak the girl boss was everywhere like female founders were on magazine covers they were raising huge amounts of money um obviously amounts that were still being raised by men everywhere all the time but that's a story for another day um building brands like becoming the face of modern ambition and then within a couple of years that entire archetype flipped they were criticized they were pushed out they were used as examples of failure.

13:36Grace Beverley: So I really want to get into why that happened and what was really going on. So to do that, let's examine those structures I mentioned earlier. There are three main ones that I picked out in the article. Firstly, venture capital in the 2010s rewarded one thing, which was scale at any cost. Like the focus of venture capital now doesn't tend to be just size. It tends to be being able to get to a size where your business operates profitably and can actually make money rather than to grow as fast as physically possible maybe with the business making no profit at all like that is not the model anymore if you're doing that you're not going to be able to continuously raise money over and over again the motto was very much raise fast grow fast worry about maintainability later and before i go on to something really interesting that was talked about in the article which is called the ambition gap i just want to talk about like the collapse of the girl boss era as well so the girl boss era we're basically putting every single female founder from the 2010s who was in this like VC backed environment we're basically homogenizing that whole group we're saying that this group is all one type of person which is completely incorrect they're all many different types of people as I've said many different mistakes versus like in terms of the severity of those mistakes and all of these different things also very different types of businesses all of this but I think that the building up of this era by the media largely was almost just classically what you'd see from a bubble in any industry like it became the it thing people invested loads into it and then essentially there was an inevitable collapse because the market was going to correct like you can't massively artificially inflate something and I'm not saying that like we shouldn't be investing in female founders of course we should but creating this unrealistic expectation to live up to and saying we actually want you to grow as much as physically possible and don't worry about profitability and when it gets to a point where they're like not sure about this anymore that means the business cannot continue it's just it's inevitable collapse so what happened really was that the market corrected which meant that funding slowed down, growth became harder.

15:49Grace Beverley: As a result, business models kind of started to crack and ultimately that meant that many of these companies could no longer sustain the kind of growth that they've been built around because if the bubble's no longer there, people are no longer investing into it, which means the business needs to be profitable and on its own rather than just growing as much as physically possible. So basically, I guess what I'm saying is that when you create a bubble, a bubble is going to pop. And there was a bubble created around this girlboss era which led to a pop but because it was the first time it was blown up so massively around female founders in this way it meant that every single female founder from that time I guess was like painted with the same brush which is so problematic because male founders fail all the time like they are allowed to fail quietly to pivot to raise again and statistically that's actually how most successful businesses happen like first-time founders have around an 18 % chance of success which increases to roughly 20 % on a second attempt and then rises to about 22 % on a third so the success rate of startups is so low but when these female founders failed it became a narrative around leadership around the fact that they weren't qualified around the fact that oh of course we shouldn't really be putting that money into these silly little frivolous female things and about like whether women could actually handle those roles rather than looking at it as a yep statistically this is pretty accurate 80 plus of those businesses that we have put on pedestals will technically statistically fail but instead of it just being a this is what the industry is it became a of course it did these silly little women how could they even have expected to be able to do that type of job in the first place still waiting in line again?

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18:19Every bill you paid could become proof of your power. Self-made? Absolutely. Self-funded? Experian could help you get there. Download the Experian app today. Results will vary. Not all payments are Boost eligible. Some may not see improved scores or approval odds. Not all lenders use credit information impacted by Experian Boost. See Experian.com for details. Here's a tip for you. There's a podcast out there with fans waiting to be your next customer. They tune in every week. They trust the host. And that host wants to talk about brands like yours in their own words to their audience. The problem is you just haven't been introduced yet.

18:56We're Acast, where that introduction happens. As the world's largest podcast marketplace, we let you browse shows, see who's listening, and book host-read sponsorships or run your own ads all from one platform. transparent pricing real-time data complete control start advertising on podcasts by visiting acast.com slash advertise and what i think is so interesting is that i keep seeing this idea around

19:26Grace Beverley: now that women are resultantly or i guess due to a number of different factors becoming less ambitious so i'm going to read you some quotes around this firstly one recent workplace study found a six point gap in ambition between men and women something researchers haven't seen before but i think it's important to say that they also found that structural inequalities were still a major factor obviously like maybe you're going to have less ambition if the chances of you succeeding are significantly lower then in the same study for every 100 women promoted only 93 women were promoted and that falls to 74 women of color for every 100 men in north america so then i think what's really interesting from that point is that we've obviously seen a massive rise in like trad wife and soft life and all of these things which again you could argue about till the fucking cows come home like there are so many different approaches to it there are so many different nuances to it all of this but I think that almost that has it's been almost framed as like a rebound like there was the girl boss and now we've gone to the soft life or the trad wife or the stay-at-home girlfriend because the girl boss was criticized for wanting too much and trying to do too much.

20:34Grace Beverley: So isn't it safer to do the opposite? What's really interesting is, well, two things. I think first of all, these are framed as the antidote to hustle culture. But if you actually look at these women, a lot of them are building businesses and like monetizing content and running platforms based off of this rebound, like this desirable, very specific looking rebound. Interestingly, I just actually finished the book Yesteryear, which I know has been everywhere at the moment. If you haven't heard of it, it's essentially about a trad wife influencer who wakes up back in like the 1850s, which was like in the lifestyle that she was, I guess, selling.

21:15Grace Beverley: It's really, really good. I really, really liked it. I worried it would be overhyped, but I actually really enjoyed it. I thought the concept was amazing and very poignant. But anyway, I think that what's really interesting is A, it's just hustle culture in a different package really isn't it it's a girl boss in a different package which really means that not only is it like you're just sold these different ideals at different times but also on top of that you're kind of damned if you do damned if you don't like in one decade it was the aspirational thing to be like the big high-flying corporate or founder or whatever and the next decade it's like oh but you've got to stay home and milk the cows and like if you're not looking after your children and someone else's than like how fucking dare you and realistically I think it's just such a good example of like the fact that you can really never win like there is this pattern where women are constantly being rewarded based on how well they fit the current version of acceptable and the current version of acceptable has been for the past few years more soft life trad wife rather than girl boss and you're always too far one or too far the other and some people will be too far one or too far the other in terms of like what's actually problematic and all of that but actually realistically I think it's it's so clear to see that actually the issue is with how women are received and how women are expected to act in different scenarios more than it is an actual issue with what the women are doing and I think that this move to trad wife and soft life has been positioned as this kind of ambition gap and this concept that women realised that those roles weren't all they cracked up to be and so now women are not as ambitious as men and I just think when you actually look at it and I think what the article explained really well is that it's not that women want less it's that they're looking at the hurdles they face to even attempt to reach those positions like the systemic built-in barriers and ceilings while also watching how within the traditional system women in leadership are often judged so much more harshly like if you look at the female founder narrative if you look at how women are dealt with in the media when they are successful and do something wrong or whatever it might be in comparison to men who are literal like pedophiles of course there would be the question as to whether it's worth it like if they look up at their supposed role models and see burnout and lack of support and pay gaps and constant scrutiny then maybe it's quite realistic and maybe it's even smart that you would start to consider is this my ambition like maybe there's actually been created a whole other barrier to entry because of what the media did around the girlboss era putting these people on pedestals and then tearing them down, you know, it did so much harm to women's ambition and their perception of success and all of this.

24:11Grace Beverley: Anyway, there was a quote within the article that actually did say in a study around this, when McKinsey adjusted the data to account for career support, including sponsorship, stretch opportunities and active managerial advocacy, the ambition gap largely disappeared. So what the data shows really is that, yeah, there might be an ambition gap, but realistically there's probably more of a support gap and like a systemic actual ability to succeed gap between men and women and if companies address that support gap the ambition gap should close so maybe we reframe the way we look at this and again like rather than the antidote to the girl boss being the trad wife maybe we can literally just never get it right and you're always going to be too far one way or too far another and it's going to be judged on how close you are to the acceptable version at the time but also on the other side of that like maybe there is no rebound from it because people aren't thinking oh I don't want to be a girl boss because Sophia Amoruso had a really tough time instead it's like well I don't think the structures are in place for me to be able to do that and actually live a happy life because you know I'm just going to be ripped to shreds and I think this is where it actually becomes relevant to us all like female founders, non-founders, generally like if you are in your 20s and 30s in particular, this is the exact stage where you're really figuring out what you might want success to look like for you in the future.

25:36Grace Beverley: And it's very easy to feel like you have to pick a lane and do it all, all of the time. Like you either need to be all in, constantly working or completely step back and renounce that way of life and the rat race and all of this, when actually I think most people want and probably are best suited to something in between like to build something meaningful to have autonomy to make money to be able to afford a house and two kids to do something good but not burn out in the process and I think what's quite interesting about this current moment is that maybe we are starting to reward more of that don't get me wrong I still think we're fucking horrendous in the media about female founders I think we are horrendous even on social media about female founders.

26:19Grace Beverley: I think it's very, very hard to run a business that revolves around experimentation and making mistakes and all of these things, which is literally what running a business does revolve around as a female founder in the media or on social media, because you're literally just going to get ripped shreds all the time in a way that male founders never get. But I think that there's definitely, I don't know, maybe there is a little bit more of a shift towards starting to reward building things that last and honest accounts of what building a business online actually looks like and how that's allowing the next generation of people who want to be founders to actually make informed decisions and I do think that this is starting to be really useful for us all because it's basically like just a helpful attempt to start to see what success is supposed to look like for you now like if you no longer want the burnout heavy hyper visible version you were sold in the 2010s you can aim for something else instead like you can aim for being a founder that doesn't look like that you can aim for a life that doesn't look like just one thing that's sold in one specific way I would like to think that generally we've had too much time on social media now that means that we're generally moving away from success as performance and more towards success as something that you can actually live with long term and all the like messy prioritization and pragmatism and realism that actually comes with that like maybe we are moving more into a world in which I don't know for example like Emma Greed's comments on the fact that like she's more of a three hour a day mum than she is like a whatever 12 hour a day because that is what is realistic within her role and just being able to say that rather than kind of trying to sell a very specific thing that actually you're never going to be able to balance both at once like how can we move to a world in which we don't expect women to work as if they don't have children and to be mums as if they don't work if we're not realistic about the taxes of both of those things anyway as always i like to have a little quote to live by before we end and i think this one from the article is a good one like i think that it maybe helps us see success as a longer term thing rather than like a 30 under 30 type sprint which is that durability is the new status symbol and i don't know maybe hopefully we're moving from a culture that prioritizes growth at all costs and visibility at all costs against durability and actually building a life that really works for you.

28:46Grace Beverley: Anyway, I'd love to know your thoughts on this one because I feel like the conversation around like ambition, work, success and burnout and all of it feels so different even five years ago. But I also think that most of us are still trying to figure out what we actually want now that we've seen both extremes. And I think it really is always so important to discuss the implications of the extremes and like what we're really being sold at the time that anything is popping up again and again and again in the media um and as always if you like this episode you'll probably really like the newsletter too because in the newsletter that's where i share all the articles i'm reading links i've fallen into rabbit holes with recommendations things i can't stop thinking about basically all the extra content and conversations that end up feeding into episodes like this but as always have a wonderful week

29:46We'll see you next time.

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