Too Pretty to Work (Part 1)

Why more young women are turning away from The Girlboss

Before I get into this, I want to make a couple things clear, just to get ahead of the nonsense:

1. I’m going to get into why, especially these days, so many young women are souring on having or valuing a career. The issue is multifaceted, and some of the reasons are ones I even relate to, so this doesn’t come from a place of me being a judgmental career woman, looking down on the idiots who don’t see the value in working.

2. I know that many young women still do want to work, I can’t possibly include every single person’s life story in one article, however I’m referencing a general vibe I’ve noticed, especially on social media, of it becoming “cringe,” almost, to value your career.

3. The title is meant to capture the overall sentiment I’ve seen on social media which I’m aware is often tongue-in-cheek; I’m not implying that any young woman who feels negatively about work genuinely believes she’s too pretty to work.

I’m going to get into the first three explanations for this phenomenon in Part 1. Part 2 will cover the rest. So if you want to read more, please subscribe!

Anyway…

In 2016, I Pokemon went to the polls, as they say, wearing a bubblegum pink pants suit. I was confident Hillary Clinton would win the election, and it was a great moment in time for slightly corny liberal white women with office jobs like me. I wasn’t in love with my job, nor was I necessarily that good at it (I was reprimanded for “going on Reddit” during work hours) but it was a big part of my identity. My dream was to become a people manager before thirty. Although I didn’t use the word “girlboss” to describe myself (I wasn’t that obsessed with my job- I prioritized spending time with my husband and playing Sims) the term “girlboss” wasn’t yet a sarcastic insult hurled by pickup artist influencers trying to hawk their Patreon to mewing teenagers who recently graduated from their Skibidi Toilet era.

It was an era for the Wizness, the woman-owned business, as Ilana Wexler on Broad City (where Hillary Clinton famously made a guest appearance) would say. Although Ilana wasn’t a successful woman (she worked at a second-rate Groupon and got in trouble for wearing a dog hoodie to work—my kindred spirit, honestly) she had the vibe of a girlboss, or at least an aspiring one. Also popular at this time was Sophia Amoruso, real-life CEO of the clothing company NastyGal (anyone remember those edgy 2010s clubbing dresses?) who literally wrote the book #Girlboss.

This brings back memories.

I also noticed that more and more women in my social circle were becoming nebulous “girlbosses” without a clear company they founded or industry. I met a woman at a networking event and I followed her on Instagram to see that she posted extremely long content about her various webinars, self-published books and inspirational speaking about “disruption.” She didn’t actually seem to have founded a company. The company was the talking about it. Nothing is safe from grifts.

In the months and years after 2016, the term girlboss—and with it, the archetype of the career-minded yet feminine young woman wearing heels with a neoprene royal blue blazer—was gone. I didn’t notice it at first, especially because it wasn’t a huge part of my own identity—I often felt a bit out of place with the real serious “women in tech” types, despite being a woman in tech myself. But by the time 2020 rolled around, the change in how young women talked about work was striking to me. And in many cases, I understood exactly where they were coming from.

1.) The Cycle of Cringe

I give Hillary Clinton too hard of a time for how she became “cringe” so quickly and so easily (truly- it shouldn’t be her job to be cool!) But during and after the 2016 election, I saw a new “type of guy” emerge (or more realistically, type of girl.) These were the pussy-hat-wearing “resist libs” who would have Twitter profile pictures with black cat-eye glasses, cheekily holding up a mug with “Lock Him Up” printed on it. These people were not all women, but the women—especially the middle class to upper middle class white women between thirty and fifty—seemed to bear the brunt of the “cringe” accusation. For a long time, I’ve believed that seemingly random derision of this particular group has a lot to do with people’s mommy issues.

There were some perhaps-legitimate criticisms of this type of person—that she was mainly concerned with the “blue team” winning and less concerned with the plight of actual oppressed people—from a workplace perspective, concerned with things like “unfair dress codes” and the “glass ceiling” while refusing to pay people below her a living wage. But a lot of what I saw online was basically: this is cringe now, you guys lost in 2016 and we don’t want to be associated with you.

Along with the archetype of the sassy resist lib woman (who for some reason became synonymous with wine moms? Not beating the mommy issues allegations, I’m afraid!) the “girlboss” faded into cringedom. It wasn’t that people thought it was bad for women to work, or bad for women to be successful, but there was something suddenly embarrassing about considering yourself a “career lady” after career ladies ostensibly took a big Coolness blow. You might be thinking, “That’s dumb, why should women be punished for Hillary Clinton losing after Trump waged a misogynistic campaign against her?” and hey, no disagreement. I’m just calling it like I see it! You might also be thinking, “Well, speak for yourself, I didn’t have this reaction!” and to you I say: great! I’m not talking about you!

Unfortunately, the online landscape is based on a foundation of things being cringe and therefore unacceptable. 2016 marked not only the defeat of the penultimate “girlboss” and her aforementioned colorful pants suits, but also the introduction of an era where people were more online than ever, everyone eager to deride things that they decreed no longer cool.

2.) Broken Dreams

When I was growing up, I aspired to be a full-time writer (and here I am at almost 35, still several thousand paid subscribers short of this dream.) I wanted to get married and have children, and I knew those aspects of my life would take priority, but I also planned on becoming a bestselling novelist. I didn’t even think about what my husband would do for a living, because in my mind, I was going to be the main breadwinner when I published my books about Victorian orphans named Bridget pensively looking out onto the moorlands. (I wound up writing a book of short memoirs about being a socially inept young married woman in the San Francisco tech world- the feeling of isolation is probably similar to Bridget’s, anyway.)

It was easy to be “career minded” when my imagined career was my passion. But as my actual career—a tech career, and not the $300K/year software developer jobs you’re thinking of—deviated from that dream, I found myself becoming less and less of a girlboss, especially when I noticed the glaring contrast between my colleagues whose dream was their job, and me.

I think a lot of young women who have rejected the idea of being ambitious or career-focused are still ambitious, just for a career they know they’ll never have. They wax poetic about starting their own bakery (arguably this is a fantasy, because owning any restaurant is a tremendous amount of work- this is what I call an “Animal Crossing aspiration”) or more realistically, their own Etsy storefront. A lot of these women still like to create in some way or other, but haven’t parlayed it into a career and don’t know where to start (and hey- it’s incredibly difficult to be a full-time creator, especially if you’re creating knitted blankets and not TikTok videos.) So they give up, or at least lose any kind of enthusiasm or motivation. And I can say from experience that it’s much easier to declare yourself lazy and unambitious than admit your dreams require a lot of work to make a reality.

3.) The Invisible Person (and the Invisible Job)

This is a phenomenon that applies to basically everything in the online world: there is an invisible person in every TikTok or Instagram video that you see, and that person is the phone.

We blindly accept content, ignoring the fact that the phone is there, but the phone being there is probably the most important piece of context. For example, a video on TikTok of a guy and a girl arguing over who picks up the check after a date. It’s easy to take it at face value and say that one or both of them are being entitled, but then you have to take it a step further and ask: why are they filming? Most likely, it’s staged! And if it’s not staged, the person filming is probably the asshole regardless of what they do in the video.

Very online young women suddenly have a plethora of other young women to whom they compare themselves. And many of these women are seemingly free from the burden of work. Except that’s not true; they’re working because they’re content creators.

When I was younger, I didn’t really know anyone who was independently wealthy enough not to work. I knew stay-at-home moms, but they often had to budget quite a bit more than moms with high-earning jobs, and they had to worry about what would happen if their husbands lost their jobs. I knew people who were very wealthy, but they had jobs, and often very high-stress ones. Today, if I open any social media app, all I see are gorgeous, fit, happy, tranquil women who all appear to have no jobs, no stress, and endless money. Even though I know it’s fake, I find myself frequently jealous that so many women “don’t have to work” while I do.

I spoke with Paige, a 29-year-old social media manager. “You watch a video that’s ‘a day in my life as a stay at home girlfriend’ and you see this beautiful thin white woman wake up with perfect skin in a big empty bed and then show her shower routine featuring the latest dove products (use code GF5 for free shipping!), make a breakfast smoothie with bloom nutrition (use code GF for 10% off!) powder, put on her pink POPFLEX set and go on an errand to target where she buys a new outfit (link in her bio) and then comes home to make dinner featuring Hello Fresh (use code GFBF for 3 meals free) and a lot of young people don’t have the social media literacy to realize it’s work—the filming, moving the camera between locations, checking the lighting, filing multiple takes, and editing it all together.”

4.) The State of Work in 2024

In some ways, white collar work is the best it’s been in a while (the ability to work remote or hybrid, better benefits, increasingly long paid parental leave, etc.) But in other ways, it’s the worst. Gone are the days of the company car, pensions, corner office or any expectation of your company valuing you long-term. People used to work at their companies for ten years. Now, in some industries, people are lucky to get two years tenure—between layoffs and the fact that often the only way to get a promotion is to leave and go to a company that offers you a more senior role.

I spoke with Maggie, a 32-year-old attorney, who says, “Jobs are no longer just jobs you show up at for a certain amount of time and can leave behind. Corporations want to milk people for all their time in exchange for increasingly insufficient funds and get pissed off and treat you like shit or fire you if you don’t comply. Pretty much nobody wants to work like that, least of all women. It’s impossible to have other priorities, like family, friends, or health, if you have to be online all the time.” While companies might boast “women in tech summits” or other big shows of fanfare for working women, none of it matters if women are expected to be available 24/7, an expectation that feels especially unfair to working mothers. And as I’ve discovered since becoming a working mom: even the most progressive workplace will secretly have issues with you prioritizing your children from time to time, but they will praise your husband for being such a dedicated dad if he does the same.

But let’s talk about men while we’re on the topic. Men have hated working for a long time. When I told my husband I wished I didn’t have to work—coming at it from the angle of a mom—he responded, “Hey, same!” Men had their own “I don’t wanna work” moment when Office Space came out in 1999. It was a hit because it was so relatable. Even in the nineties, work often made people want to jump out a window. But notably, Office Space focuses primarily on male workers. That’s because—and this is just my theory—since women won the “right” to work, for a long time it felt counterintuitive to complain about it. Not that women couldn’t complain about having a bad day at work; we’ve been doing that since forever. But to say we wished we didn’t have to work at all, to say that things were better when we weren’t expected to work, or to fantasize about smashing a copier (or, the 2024 equivalent: logging out of Slack forever) felt like a step backwards, “handing one” to the right-wing agitators who insist women shouldn’t work because we’re incompetent, not because work itself is annoying. Media about working women in the nineties contrasted from Office Space in that work wasn’t seen as surrendering to an unreasonable and overpaid boss—it was a new thing, it was empowering, and it was glamorous (the nuggets of girlbossism.)

Not to mention, many young women (myself included) have become disillusioned with the idea that a workplace being women-centric means it’s going to treat us well. I spoke with Maya, a 29-year-old product manager, who said, “I really liked mentoring others in college and doing more organizational based work and so I thought that I was really suited for a leadership position in the workplace and worked really hard to get there fast. I ended up working at a small female-founded company as my second job and it really changed my perception of what’s important for my happiness at work. I thought that working at a female-founded company would give me more psychological safety but actually was the least emotionally stable and safe I’ve felt at a job in my entire career. I saw a leader who was more interested in being a boss than actually leading her company and the rest of us and it really was the most miserable I’ve ever been at work.” Since companies have prioritizing hiring women and valuing women in leadership, many young women have realized that having a “girlboss” still means having a boss, and woman leaders aren’t necessarily more empathetic than men.

Think about the term girlboss. It implies that there is something remarkable and special about being both a girl and a boss. The “girl” subverts “boss” and vice versa. But there’s a reason there’s no “boyboss.” It was always assumed that boys were the bosses. Men have had the luxury of hating their 9-5 jobs since the concept of a 9-5 began. Women, on the other hand, had the initial excitement about even having the option for financial independence. For some women today, that might still be exciting. But the 2020s marked the beginning of a decade when most working women didn’t remember a time when they couldn’t work, and their mothers probably didn’t either. The idea that working was subversive—an opportunity instead of an obligation—died a long time ago. We have to work now. We no longer get to work.

Women have their own Office Space now, but it’s the feminized, Clean Girl version: day in the life videos on TikTok idealizing a slow, completely unproductive day full of acai bowls, meditation, and smoothies, everything adorned with avant basic pastel decor and pink bows. Or, for the RETVRN contingent: pastoral fantasies about abandoning screens, technology and modern medicine, and living out your days birthing ten children and sustenance farming in a linen Reformation smock.

Don’t miss Part 2!

I haven’t even gotten into some of the biggest explanations for this phenomenon—I mean, I didn’t even get into tradwives or politics outside of Hillary Clinton. So subscribe, and you’ll get Part 2 delivered to your inbox as soon as it’s up!

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