The image of the successful man doesn’t change very much: wealthy, sharply dressed, popular, living life on his terms.
The image of the successful woman changes every few years, and another change just dropped. #GirlBoss, traceable to a woman CEO’s biography released in 2014 (more on that in a bit), has been replaced by #GirlFailure.
The #GirlBoss was a SHE.E.O, a creator, a hustler and, soon enough, a caricature. She woke at 4 am to practice self-care and prepare to conquer the day. Walked into work in designer suits, holding a designer bag and a designer coffee. Not all the men in the boardroom could keep her from living “like a queen”.
#GirlFailure is being pitched as the antidote to that cluster of unrealistic, hyper-capitalist aims. This new ideal is someone who owns her chaos, wears her failures with pride, flaunts her flaws.
The hashtag can be traced to a tweet posted in January, by @ricshatty, a nondescript account with 619 followers.
“im tired of fictional women having to be the coolest and most powerful and the best to be stanned i want more female characters who are Just Some Guy and OBSESSED over for it,” the user posted, in a thread that has over 37,000 retweets.
The tweet urged people to share their favourite “girl failures”. Users responded by citing flawed characters from film and television such as Birdie Jay, the ditzy, love-starved model-turned-designer in Glass Onion (2022; played by Kate Hudson); the dry-witted, self-sabotaging Fleabag (2016-19), written and played by Phoebe Waller-Bridge; and Sarah Snook’s Siobhan Roy, the girl boss who just never seems to win, in Succession (2018-23).
The idea plays into a drastic shift in how we perceive vulnerability, says behavioural analyst and productivity coach Aditi Surana. “Imperfections are no longer shortcomings but are wielded as unique personality tags. Failures are accepted, even celebrated for the lessons they provide.”
But there’s still an element of perfection and polarisation at play here, warns psychotherapist Shanaya Boyce. “A shift to valuing vulnerability can promote a more authentic and less competitive environment for personal growth. This is just swapping out one issue for another.”
Why must it be one of two extremes, Boyce and Surana ask.
The tussle over how to define female success can be traced to the term “career woman”, which started out in the 1930s as shorthand for “ruthless, selfish and uncaring”. In films — often the bellwether of the national mood — the “career woman” (defined as a woman who put work before family) was typically a surly ice queen, a bully at work and quietly miserable in her empty home.
As recently as 2006, the popular film The Devil Wears Prada (starring Meryl Streep; based on a novel of the same name) mixed a whole host of these stereotypes into its plot.
In 2014, partly in reaction to the tropes, Sophia Amoruso, a former stripper and shoplifter who set up the hugely successful online fashion store Nasty Gal, released an autobiography titled #GirlBoss. The book — part memoir, part manifesto — became a bestseller. The hashtag blew up on social media almost immediately.
Amoruso defined “girl boss”, rather simply, as someone who was willing to work hard to achieve big dreams, took measured risks and managed failure effectively.
On social media, women and women influencers offered their own takes. (The hashtag still calls up 27.2 million posts on Instagram today.) The term gradually morphed into shorthand for “aggressively ambitious and aesthetically perfect”.
Meanwhile, about a year in, it began to emerge that a range of girlbosses, including Amoruso, had secured their success at the cost of a toxic environment that sought only to allow the girl boss to thrive.
By 2015, there were allegations of discrimination and toxic work culture at Nasty Gal. By 2016, the company had filed for bankruptcy.
“The widely accepted definition of girlboss — a multi-tasking, power-hungry woman who is too busy for lunch — couldn’t be more inaccurate anyway,” says Surana. In her interactions with women corporate leaders, she has found that most, for instance, are more collaborative and cognisant of their limits than the average person because that’s a big part of what it takes to function effectively at that level.
No one hashtag may ever encapsulate this. The problem, at its core, lies with assigning labels to women to begin with, Surana adds. There is no #boyboss or #boyfailure. “Society needs to just normalise our journeys as humans with our ups and downs, rather than idealised beings who are either flawless and inspirational or celebrated failures.”
E-Paper
