As some of the OG era’s figureheads return and new models of ownership take hold, the question is whether we are entering a girlboss 2.0 and what will be different this time.
In recent months, several female founders synonymous with the 2010s wave of millennial entrepreneurship have begun their second acts. Audrey Gelman, co-founder of Insta-famous women’s co-working space The Wing, has returned with a new venture.
Reformation founder Yael Aflalo is back in the startup world. And Tyler Haney has rejoined athleticwear brand Outdoor Voices. The reappearances arrive nearly a decade after the era’s cultural peak, during which a new archetype of female ambition took hold. Media outlets such as Refinery29 championed a version of “career feminism”, celebrating a generation of young female founders supposedly rewriting the rules of business. Startups like Glossier and Nasty Gal turned their founders into cultural figures by positioning them as the faces of the brand online. Figures like Emily Weiss and Sophia Amoruso documented the building of their companies on social media, sharing pastel office spaces, venture capital announcements, and slogans about women supporting women — all creating a distinctively millennial “girlboss” narrative of entrepreneurial ambition. Then, almost as quickly as she rose, the girlboss was dismantled. “The broader business and finance world expected young women to operate at the same level as a 45-year-old man who’d spent two decades in the industry,” says Sharmadean Reid, who emerged as one of the UK’s most visible girlboss figures through her nail salon Wah Nails and later tech platform The Stack World. “There wasn’t much recognition that youth and ambition don’t equal experience. Instead of mentorship or access to networks, a lot of people simply took advantage.” Reid also points to what she describes as a “last-in, first-out” dynamic during the pandemic downturn, when many younger founders — particularly women who entered the business world during the 2010s wave — were among the first to lose funding or support as the economy tightened. At the same time, the cultural mood was shifting. Several girlboss-era firms faced internal reckonings over workplace culture, racism, and toxic management practices, puncturing the image of feminist utopia that had fueled their early appeal. But the backlash extended beyond individual scandals. The election of Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton in 2016 marked a broader rupture in the optimistic strain of liberal feminism that had defined much of the decade. Yet, the era did move the needle. “Women executives in the C-suite now make up about 29%, so just under a third. That’s a significant difference from the 17% when we started in 2014,” says Megan McConnell, a partner at McKinsey and co-author of its annual Women in the Workplace report. “There has been meaningful progress in increasing women’s representation, especially at the top of companies.” Ten years on, the girlboss may be gone. But the tensions she exposed between ambition, capitalism, and whether women can truly reshape the systems they enter remain unresolved. As some of the OG era’s figureheads return and new models of ownership take hold, the question is whether we are entering a girlboss 2.0 and what will be different this time. The ambition gap isn’t about ambition For much of the 2010s, women were told that the route to empowerment was to “lean in”, a mantra popularized by Sheryl Sandberg in her 2013 book of the same name. The idea is that women should pursue leadership more assertively, whether that’s by speaking up in meetings, negotiating promotions, or remaining committed to career advancement despite structural inequalities in the workplace — with the hope that once more women reach positions of power, the system itself might begin to change. But in the years since, the cultural conversation around ambition has shifted sharply. Across social media, new archetypes of womanhood have emerged: tradwives, stay-at-home girlfriends, “soft life” advocates, and burnout feminists, each promising an escape from the relentless productivity that defined the girlboss decade, sometimes wrapped in reactionary ideas about women’s place in society. That shift is beginning to show up in data. “This was the first year since tracking ambition consistently for five years that we saw a gap,” says McConnell. “We double-checked the analyses several times because it was surprising. The question became: why are we seeing a six-point difference between men and women when we hadn’t seen that before?” Structural inequalities remain a key factor. This year, for every 100 men promoted, only 93 women were promoted, McConnell says — falling to 74 women of color for every 100 men. In North America, Black women fall furthest behind, with only 60 promoted for every 100 men. When researchers examined the gap more closely, they found it was not a collapse in motivation but a recalibration of expectations. Many respondents, McConnell says, look at senior roles and question whether the trade-offs are worth it. According to Pew Research, women still earn roughly 84 to 85 cents for every dollar earned by men on average, a pay gap that compounds over time and contributes to the sense that greater responsibility does not always translate to proportional financial reward. “Women look up and see the quality of life of those currently in those roles, and it doesn’t necessarily seem admirable,” McConnell explains, citing the combined pressures of work and caregiving responsibilities that men do not face in the same way. Crucially, when McKinsey adjusted the data to account for career support, including sponsorship, stretch opportunities, and active managerial advocacy, the ambition gap largely disappeared. “What the data shows is that there is both an ambition gap and a support gap,” McConnell says. “If companies address the support gap, the ambition gap should close.” The shift also reflects a broader cultural reckoning with the ideals that defined the girlboss era. For many workers, what was once framed as ambition is increasingly emerging as unsustainable labor. “A lot of what was branded as ambition was actually exploitation that you were OK with,” says journalist Kate Lindsay, author of “Embedded” newsletter and host of ICYMI, Slate’s internet culture podcast, who worked at Refinery29 during the height of girlboss culture. Long hours, blurred boundaries and unpaid emotional labor were recast as markers of dedication, even when the promised advancement failed to materialize. According to the Oxford Review of Economic Policy, real wage growth slowed dramatically after the 2008 financial crisis, falling from about 2.2% between 1980-2007 to roughly 0.4% annually from 2008-2023. “The conflation of ambition with accepting bad conditions is something that has now been untangled,” she continues. “You did all that because you thought that’s how you advanced. But you’re not rewarded for it. All the company sees is that they can pay you a low salary and get more work out of you. There’s no incentive for them to change that.” If the girlboss era promised women they could conquer the system through relentless effort, the post-girlboss moment is defined less by retreat than recalibration. “I’m interested in the more independent route — what can I build for myself outside the system?” Lindsay continues. For her, that autonomy is embodied in her mailing list. “My Substack email list is one of the most valuable things I have. A job can lay me off, but no one can take that away from me.” A post-girlboss market While the girlboss era was built on the promise that women could conquer the system through relentless effort, the post-girlboss moment is being shaped by two shifts: a colder investment climate, and a growing reassessment of what success at work and in business should look like. During the height of venture capital exuberance, startups were encouraged to move fast, raise aggressively, and scale at almost any cost. Visibility and momentum often mattered more than ownership or sustainability. But that environment has changed and with it, the incentives facing founders. “Back then, there was also less understanding of governance. People would raise lots of capital and they wouldn’t necessarily have people around them to help steward it,” says Anna Sweeting, founder of The Equity Studio, whose portfolio includes female-founded brands like 111Skin, DeMellier, Trip, and Vestiaire Collective. “In a positive way, the shift in the capital markets has meant that founders have to become much more aware of cap table dynamics — dilution, ownership — because in many of the stories from the early days, people overly diluted and were no longer in control of their own companies.” She adds that investors now understand that visibility builds brand and plays a key role, but what creates real long-term value and wealth is ownership. “The market is not blindly rewarding growth at all costs anymore. That reduces the structural advantage of certain archetypes. The Silicon Valley template and the blitzscale model — the bar is different now,” says Sweeting. The shift in capital markets has coincided with a broader rethink of work itself. For some founders who lived through the startup boom, the mythology of constant hustle now looks less like ambition and more like burnout. “From the start, we agreed we don’t want to build a business that burns us out again,” says Reid of her recently launched beauty brand 39BC. “That’s the simple truth. We both want to build something long term and community based. We’re not building it just to make a lot of money and buy more handbags.” That change in mindset has translated into a different operating model. Reid runs her business remotely, with looser expectations around working hours. “We semi-take Fridays off — it’s unspoken, but people might not be at their desks,” she says. “I work very intuitively. How I feel that day shapes how I work. Somehow, I always get the work done, but I don’t sit at my desk for the sake of it.” More fundamentally, Reid has rejected the startup mythology that defined much of the girlboss decade. “Startup culture glorified ‘building the plane while flying it’,” she says. “I love that energy. But when that’s 80% of your life instead of 20%, it creates chronic stress. You’re constantly thinking: how do I solve this problem? And the next one, and the next one.” The solution, for Reid, has been to embrace predictability rather than disruption. “There’s a playbook for scaling a product-based bath and body business,” she says. “Companies have been doing it since the ’60s, the ’80s, the ’90s. Instead of putting my body and brain under constant stress, I’ve written out what the 10-year playbook looks like, and we’re working through it step by step.” The difference, she says, is profound. “I used to wake up in the middle of the night reciting my pitch deck. My first thought would be something like: how are we going to acquire more beauty professionals in Italy if we don’t have Italian language support? It was constant. You could never turn your brain off.” For investors like Sweeting, the current environment is starting to reward exactly that kind of discipline. “In this cycle, female founders are often outstandingly capital efficient, sometimes out of necessity,” she says. “That means they’ve built incredible businesses with strong economic fundamentals. And that’s attractive to investors, because it means they’re going to make a return.” Sweeting also points to a broader correction in how founders are evaluated. “There was confusion between charisma and narrative, and what actually makes a sustainable business. That velocity of being in the press and talking about your story was rewarded at some point. There’s greater fluency now between influence in culture and capital,” she adds. The girlboss era blurred those boundaries. Founders were encouraged to build powerful personal narratives alongside their companies — stories that investors, media, and audiences were eager to amplify. But when businesses struggled, the same storytelling machinery turned back on the individuals behind them. “Influence without infrastructure is actually very fragile. When founding narratives became very personal, which was shaped by the capital environment at the time, scrutiny became personal as well. That isn’t exclusive to women, but women-led brands in consumer categories were framed very closely around the founder identity. That’s just what happened, says Sweeting. “When those businesses faced challenges, as many did in the post-Covid era, when growth proved unsustainable, the narrative followed the individuals rather than the market conditions.” Today, she argues, the market is beginning to value something different. “Durability is the new status symbol,” she says. “The market rewards capital discipline, and discipline is back in favor.”
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