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It’s the early 2010s and I am in Beverly Hills. The sun is blazing down, like a glorious lemon cake, and the air smells sweet, like palm tree wood and perfume. Every single lawn glitters green and immaculate. I need to live like this one day, I remember thinking, in that way you do when you’ve just been seduced by someone fit who’s clearly bad news. I have to earn some money. My mind swims, with visions of high rise offices and six figure salaries and iced coffee in a Jeep. There’s only one solution: I must become a girlboss. A She-E-O. A media mogul with scented, tousled locks.
A decade later and, er, I’m not living in Beverly Hills (yet!). I live in South East London, on a freelance writer’s wage, which isn’t much against the backdrop of the cost of living crisis. I am also, I have to say, not a girlboss. I quit my job as a senior editor at a major publication earlier this year. I don’t work nonstop, without breaks, and my Google calendar does not contain things like “Yoga at 6, meetings until 3. Pick kids up at 4, followed by Pilates.” I still can’t drive. My days are chill: I write, drink coffee and read. I’m probably closer to a 1990s-style slacker than a millennial girlboss, although I don’t wear flannel. Like most people, I’m just trying to get by.
Culturally, much has changed in the decade since my semi-ironic-but-also-not-quite girlboss dreams. The girlboss herself has become cringe, pastiche, an embarrassment in her dedication to the “rise and grind.” Mostly, thankfully, she’s now recognized for what she always was: an apparition for those who aren’t wealthy to begin with. Just as in the late 1980s, the myth of the woman who can “have it all” has crumbled in the face of rising rent prices, stagnant wages, and anaemic-looking peppers being sold at your local supermarket for $1 each. The days of metal water bottles reading #slaythedayaway are long gone. We’re living in a post-girlboss era.
That said, in the past few years, I’ve noticed that it’s not just our cartoonish idea of the girlboss that has vanished—the one with The Wing membership and balayage hair—but also the “career woman” more generally. I grew up watching films like The Devil Wears Prada, Legally Blonde, 13 Going on 30, and The Princess Diaries—stories that fed me ideas about what success might look like (brunch dates, high cortisol, designer handbags). The career woman was glamourized, romanticized, with their work ethic pushed front and center. But now, this archetype on screen has all but disappeared (with the exception, perhaps, of reality shows like Selling Sunset, although that feels more like money porn than “you, too, could become a millionaire estate agent”).
Elsewhere, online, the influencer—once a figure with an immaculate gray living room and Ivy Park gym clothes—has since evolved into a less in-your-face career type (accessible Gen Z influencers like Madeline Argy spring to mind). Celebs like Bella Hadid and Lily-Rose Depp post photos of themselves doing “relatable” things like eating strawberries with chipped nails or at home with the dog in a headband. Their wealth is still apparent—of course it is, capitalism isn’t dead just yet—but it’s not so flagrantly tied up with careerism. We’re no longer bombarded with ideas about us “all having the same 24 hours in a day” or being “self-made.”
In some ways, the career woman appears to have been replaced by the health conscious woman—the one who prioritizes her vitamin intake, hydration, and sleep cycle over endless meetings and salary increases. Online trends like “lazy girl jobs” and “soft-quitting” push life satisfaction to the forefront, as opposed to bragging about how many emails you have to wade through, or how many employees you’re responsible for. Partly, this is a good thing—I’m all for swapping out office overtime with circadian rhythm apps—but there’s still an element of perfectionism at play here. We’re expected to be sober, dewy-skinned versions of ourselves, with wholesome interests and therapized brains.
You might also point to the rise of “side-hustle culture” as being partly responsible for killing off the archetypal careerist. Young people today are having to work multiple jobs just to make ends meet. They’re running Depop businesses, becoming party photographers, doing DJ streams on Twitch. Hobbies are there to be monetized, with no free time going to “waste.” It’s no longer enough to work one job, with a minimal salary that can barely cover a damp house share. If The Devil Wears Prada were made today, Andy Sachs would definitely be unable to afford anything close to Prada. She’d have to run her own YouTube channel or something on the side, in between reselling old clothes on Vinted.
While career expectations come for us all, it’s more often than not women who are shoved into specific cultural archetypes (a male girlboss is just a boss, a male CEO is to be expected). I won’t get into the nitty gritty of why that might be—much has already been written about women in the workplace, and how this is reflected in wider culture, by people much smarter than me (see: Lost in Work by Amelia Horgan, Poor Little Sick Girls by Ione Gamble, I’m Not Yelling: A Black Woman’s Guide to Navigating the Workplace by Elizabeth Leiba). But I will say this: Any kind of societal expectation, specifically as it relates to gender, is usually a trap. There is no “right” way to be. And being “self-made” is, often, a myth, peddled by the lucky few.
I would still one day love to live in Beverly Hills. Or at least West Hollywood, in an oak-floored bungalow with a peach tree in the garden, and plenty of sun. I’d still love to learn how to drive, and drink iced coffees in the parking lot. I still want money—don’t we all—and soft, well-kept hair that smells like sandalwood. But I’m slightly more realistic now about how to get there than I was at 18. And I definitely, definitely do not harbor a single dream of becoming a girlboss. She’s dead in the cultural imagination anyway. And from where I’m standing, there is absolutely no reviving her.