Is the Girlboss a Model of Feminine Leadership?

How the Gendering of Leadership Traits Fucks with Women

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The Girlboss aesthetic—pink and flowy

I once took a job at an ad agency once because I liked the strategy department head. He fit the archetype of bosses-I-like, a man who was empathetic, intuitive, and focused on the growth of his employees. I was excited to learn from him and to grow my leadership skills under him. A couple months into my tenure, he left the agency, and he was not replaced. I was left boss-less and found myself without a real mentor or champion.

 Soon enough, I was removed from one the accounts I led, an account that I had won handily leading a cross-functional team. The account was taken over by a girlboss type who had been there for years, who wore floppy hats to business meetings, dropped words like “badass” into presentation decks, and made my life as the new hire very uncomfortable.

The Gendering of Leadership Traits

What I realized was that my idea of leadership never fit the agency’s model. My empathetic boss was an anomaly in a company built on swagger and bravado: men and women who threw people under the bus to get to the front of the room, made big promises with little back up, and lived for the competition. I embraced a more collaborative form of leadership: getting buy-in for decisions, creating opportunities for my team to shine, and not pushing other people down to get ahead.

The latter set of leadership traits has been categorized as ‘feminine.’ The Female Quotient, a site dedicated to elevating female leaders, explains it this way: 

Today women make up half the workforce. With this evolution comes a shift in leadership traits, with more value being placed on qualities that have been traditionally considered feminine—and largely ignored (think empathy, collaboration, and intuition). Clearly, it’s time to dispel the stereotype that there is room only for masculine traits (such as being direct, competitive, and assertive) in the boardroom—and embrace the fact that any good leader, regardless of gender, also embodies these traits traditionally considered feminine.

Embedded within the argument for feminine leadership traits is the idea that women are inherently more empathetic, collaborative, and intuitive than men. I tend to disagree with this essentialist argument; although many women do embody those traits and thrive in environments where these are embraced, there are many who do not fit that mold. Men, like the one who led the department, can exhibit those ‘feminine’ traits as well—and be rewarded for it.

The way this researcher explained it in 2003, biological sex has no relation to agentic (goal-driven, individual-oriented, and often characterized masculine) behavior and communal (consensus-driven, community-oriented, and often characterized feminine) behavior. Agentic behavior drives career growth and also, as a person moves forward in their career, they exhibit more agentic behaviors—regardless of gender.

In the era of the girlboss, we learned that lesson. 

The Girlboss Gets Judged

The girlboss is the 20-teen’s millennial entrepreneur archetype, agentic and photogenic young women who wooed the press and investors with their vision and wardrobe, built multi-million dollar companies, and wrote inspiring books about how to beat the odds and succeed.

Over the last several years, women leaders who have exemplified the girlboss have fallen into the pits of cancel culture for treating their employees, often women and people of color, terribly: Audrey Gelman of The Wing, Steph Korey of Away, Nasty Gal founder the literal author of the book #Girlboss Sophia Amaruso,  Miki Agrawal of Thinx, and most recently Jessica Koslow of the restaurant Sqirl, whose moldy jam scandal led to additional allegations of recipe stealing and a toxic work environment. And when they fall, they do so spectacularly, in PR nightmares that batter sales and set off gleeful Twitter pile-ons. 

Girbosses hanging out: Audrey Gelman, Allison Williams, and Sophia Amoruso at Marie Claire’s 2013 power lunch.

I applauded the rise of the girlboss. They were game changers. Audrey Gelman was the first pregnant CEO to grace the cover of Inc Magazine. Miki Agrawal made it ok to talk about periods in subway ads. The very vision of seeing a young woman in a powerful role without sacrificing her femininity was a promise to so many, and countless companies and founders have generated wealth and influence because of it. As Amanda Mull says (critically) in her excellent Atlantic article about the end of the girlboss: 

Like Sheryl Sandberg’s self-help hit Lean In before it, #Girlboss argued that the professional success of ambitious young women was a two-birds-one-stone type of activism: Their pursuit of power could be rebranded as a righteous quest for equality, and the success of female executives and entrepreneurs would lift up the women below them.

So when they fell so hard, I was skeptical at the schadenfreude in social media. Yes, they turned out to be terrible bosses, treated people awfully, and mostly their cancellation was justified. But here’s the rub. Men have been equally terrible, if not worse. Elon Musk’s bad behavior endangers workers, and, in what’s apparently a more egregious sin, endangers shareholder value, and yet continues to be considered a figure of inspiration in the tech community. Travis Kalanick was famous for his terrible company culture for years before he was finally forced to step down in 2017 after covered up complaints of discrimination and harassment were revealed, and kept a lucrative board position till the end of 2019. Even Steve Jobs, the patron saint of the tech bro, turned out to be a pretty terrible boss. 

So why the heavy hand for young women who were playing by the same agentic rule book of founders before them? 

Why the Girlboss Gets Judged—And Why It Matters

There are plenty of reasons why women in leadership roles are judged more harshly than men.

Founder Sharmadean Reid argues that female founders are asked to play brand ambassador early in their company’s growth in ways that male founders are not, and because they are in the spotlight as the face of a brand, they’re more susceptible to getting cancelled.

If a communal leadership style is considered a more ‘feminine’ leadership trait, when women do not treat their employees well, it’s not only a reflection on the individual, but also on the hypocrisy of the brand. Leigh Stein, a novelist and feminist activist, notes:

The problem with making girlboss feminism a part of your brand in order to appeal to customers was that those customers were going to expect you to put your values into practice.

There is also an expectation that women will behave in a more communal fashion as leaders and if they don’t, the backlash is punishing. A recent study found that:

Women incur greater penalties for ethical transgressions because of persistent gender stereotypes that tend to categorize women as having more communal traits than men, such as being more likable, sensitive and supportive of others. Even in leadership settings, women are still expected to be more communal than their male counterparts.

And just because women and men can both exhibit agentic and communal leadership styles, doesn’t mean that women and men have equal shots at getting to the top. The assumption of women’s tendency towards communal, according to this 2018 study:

Our results suggest that the concentration of men in top decision-making roles such as corporate boards and chief executive offices may be self-sustaining because men in particular tend to devalue more communal styles of leadership -- and men are typically the gatekeepers to top organizational positions of prestige and authority.

This is the double-edged, or even quadruple-edged, sword. Women filling the stereotype of communal leadership traits are kept back by people seeking agentic leadership traits in leaders. When women do go against expectations and exhibit agentic leadership traits, they can succeed spectacularly—but also be punished harshly by systems who expect them to play nice.

The villainization of young women in power is incredibly problematic. It can chill the voices and ambitions of women, who already experience more harassment online. It colors the way investors and consumers view women leaders. In the wake of a widely discussed Away exposé, I had a long Twitter argument with a man in tech who dug up Glass Door ratings of other women-founded companies as proof that women shouldn’t lead.

Gilrboss’s millennial pink, slogan-laden and often very white version of feminism has taken a hit. The girlboss has become the easy-to-pillory model for millennial capitalism, perhaps in the same vein that Karen has become the model for white middle-class racism. They are both archetypes of white feminism, which is problematic in many ways. The white feminist movement has a long history of exclusion of women of color and trans women that continues today, and it has long desired to replicate and have access to the structures that have historically been the spaces for white men of means, often at the expense of a more radical vision. 

In the US especially, the agentic leadership style is prized—and we’re seeing the most malignant, deadly form of it in the most powerful role in the land today. No matter the gender, when agentic leadership is prized above all, people suffer. But as both the idea of the girlboss and its biggest icons get taken down, I can’t help but wonder at how we can develop new models of leadership that go beyond these dichotomies.

2020 has served as a breaking point for so many structures in leadership, health, justice, economy, and equality. I explore how individuals and companies can find lessons out of this year’s challenges to create a better world. Sign up for more.

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