The fall of GirlBoss is not so tragic

Along with “Live, Laugh, Love” decorations and inaccurate BuzzFeed quizzes, the millennial “#Girlboss” craze has finally been laid to rest. But who is this so-called GirlBoss? If you ask her, she’s a go-getter with a killer resume, hustler work ethic and a one-track mind of climbing the corporate ladder. But if you look at the facts, she is often just an affluent (usually) white woman who partakes in the same harmful power dynamics as her male counterparts. 

This trend of “self-made” businesswomen in positions of power found its catchy name by none other than Sophia Amoruso, author of the business memoir #Girlboss and founder of the fast-fashion company NastyGal. This new movement established that the pursuit for inequality, especially in the workplace, came from a lack of women in positions of power. 

The solution was more women-run businesses and women CEOs — women with “unapologetic ambition.” Like trickle-down economics (we all have seen how well that works), the act of allotting women power within companies would empower and grant equality to other women around them. Rather than going for the jugular and dismantling the system of oppression itself, Amoruso and others thought that women could simply make it better from within. 

However Amaruso’s GirlBoss moment (along with its own Netflix adaptation) abruptly collapsed when accusations of discrimination and abuse were brought forth; eventually, Amaruso even filed for bankruptcy. Amid this scandal and the social and political upheaval of the last few years, it has become clear that GirlBossing was merely a “female empowerment” branding scheme catered to wealthy white cis-gendered women so that they wouldn’t have to feel bad about wanting a role in corporate America. Instead of uplifting other women, most of these female CEOs were actually proven to be just as bad as their male counterparts, participating in the same amount of abuse, mistreatment and corruption. 

Changing the gender of an individual at the top of a company’s hierarchy does not alleviate its inherent inequality because white corporate corruption and abuse cannot be defeated with more of the same thing. Corporate power structures and late-stage capitalism innately thrive and profit off the backs of working-class people, particularly working-class people of color.

If an entire system and its history rest upon a foundation of white supremacy and exploitation, then a mere adjustment in leadership — especially to someone with almost the same privileged status as white men — will never be enough. 

The punchline within all of this discourse, however, is that the whole GirlBoss movement never set out to genuinely help women or dismantle the patriarchy. It was, instead, a sneaky and well-branded way to justify accruing wealth and capitalizing on the abuses within the corporate system. 

Referring back to the case of GirlBoss patient zero Amoruso, it is important to note that NastyGal is a fast-fashion company that uses sweatshop labor and looks the other way at unregulated, unsafe work conditions. Approximately 80% of garment workers in the clothing manufacturing industry — primarily in the Global South — are women. It seems that in the GirlBoss ethical guidelines, there is no mention of uplifting or protecting women whose labor women CEOs could use to line their own pockets. 

Under the guise of equality and empowerment, this type of elitist and superficial “feminism” has done the exact opposite of its surface-level intentions by further oppressing and abusing the most vulnerable groups of women in our society. A GirlBoss cannot become the first ethical billionaire because the middle part of the “Capitalism vs. Equality” Venn diagram is blank. It is integral to detach faith in capitalist structures to enact legitimate and transformative change and justice. For guidance in dismantling the system, we must instead look to the very people the harmful system has and continues to cripple.