Girlboss Is Dead. What Killed It, and What Comes Next.

Here's what's about to happen on Sunday: your inbox, your timeline, and every store you've ever shopped at will erupt in pink. "Celebrate women." "Invest in yourself." "This IWD, we're donating 10% of sales to [vague women's nonprofit]." Corporate feminism will have its annual festival, and it will look exactly like what it is—an ideology that has figured out how to monetize women's frustration without threatening the structures that cause it.

I wrote this morning about where International Women's Day actually came from. It came from garment workers on a picket line. It came from women who understood that the problem wasn't their attitude or their confidence level—it was who owned the factory.

This post is about what happened between that picket line and the purchase of a $38 "Nevertheless, She Persisted" mug.

The Promise (And We Should Say It Out Loud Before We Bury It)

Sheryl Sandberg published Lean In in 2013. I was 18, and even then I felt vaguely suspicious of it, though I couldn't have articulated why. The argument was tidy: women hold themselves back. Women don't negotiate. Women don't raise their hands. Women sit at the back of the conference room and wait to be invited forward. If women just adopted the behaviors of successful men—projecting confidence, claiming space, saying yes to stretch assignments—the pipeline would fill. Pay gaps would close. Equality would follow individual behavior change at scale.

It was a genuinely appealing argument if you were already inside a building that had a conference room.

The problem wasn't that Sandberg was lying about her own experience. The problem was that it was an individual solution to a structural problem—and those are two completely different things, and conflating them is either naive or useful depending on who's doing it.

The Data, Thirteen Years Later

Here's where I channel my dad, who always said: never trust someone who tells you a system is working without showing you the spreadsheet.

Thirteen years after Lean In, women in the United States:

• Still earn roughly 84 cents to every dollar earned by white men, per BLS data through 2024—and for Black and Latina women, that figure drops to approximately 67 and 57 cents respectively. (The "lean in" approach evidently has different returns depending on race, which Sandberg's framework essentially ignored; Koa Beck documents this in White Feminism with uncomfortable precision.)
• Are still underrepresented at every level of corporate management above entry level, despite women having been the majority of U.S. college graduates for roughly four decades—a gap that should, by the pipeline theory's own logic, have closed by now
• Are burning out faster and at higher rates than men in equivalent roles—McKinsey's Women in the Workplace reports from 2022 through 2024 have shown this consistently, with women managers burning out at significantly higher rates than their male counterparts in the same jobs

You cannot explain that burnout gap with insufficient leaning. Women in management positions have leaned all the way in. The data shows they are burning up from the friction.

The She-Cession Was the Stress Test Nobody Wanted

If you want to know whether a framework is actually correct, stress-test it. COVID stress-tested lean-in feminism, and the results were not kind.

In the first months of 2020, women's job losses significantly outpaced men's—the National Women's Law Center tracked this in real time, coining the term "she-cession" as the numbers came in. Women were disproportionately concentrated in the service sectors that collapsed first: hospitality, retail, food service. And simultaneously they were bearing the crushing weight of unpaid caregiving as schools closed and childcare vanished.

No amount of leaning in addresses the fact that childcare infrastructure in this country is a disaster. No amount of leaning in addresses the fact that women's jobs were concentrated in sectors that a pandemic would predictably devastate. No amount of leaning in addresses the fact that we built an economy where caregiving is simultaneously essential and economically invisible.

A decade of slow, grinding progress in women's workforce participation was erased in a matter of months.

That's what happens when you try to fix a structural problem with individual behavior. The structure holds. And when the structure breaks, the individual has nowhere to stand.

How Burnout Became Your Fault (And Why That Was Useful)

Here's the piece I keep coming back to, the part that I think gets underanalyzed: girlboss feminism didn't just fail to fix the system. It actively provided cover for the system by relocating the problem inside individual women.

You're burned out? You haven't optimized your boundaries. You're underpaid? You didn't negotiate hard enough. You're exhausted? Have you tried a better morning routine, a meditation app, a more resilient mindset?

Burnout-as-personal-failure is incredibly useful to employers. If your exhaustion is evidence of your insufficient self-management, then it's not evidence of an unsustainable workload, an understaffed team, or wages that force people to work multiple jobs. The diagnostic points inward. The remedy is personal. The system is never the subject.

The McKinsey data on women managers isn't complicated: women in those roles are doing more work with the same or fewer resources, absorbing more emotional labor, and are less likely to be promoted at rates that would justify that additional investment. The structure is extracting more from them and returning less. But if the reigning framework says the gap is about attitude and behavior, then closing that gap means changing your attitude and behavior—not the structure.

That framework was not neutral. It had a beneficiary. That beneficiary was not women.

The Implosion (It Was Loud and We Should Learn from It)

The cultural collapse of girlboss as a concept happened fast. If you want to mark the moment, look at 2019 to 2022.

The Wing—the members-only coworking space that explicitly branded itself as a feminist community—faced a public reckoning in 2020 when workers, many of them Black and brown women, came forward with accounts of a workplace that preached feminist values while paying poverty wages and suppressing organizing. Away Luggage's CEO was documented in The Verge for workplace culture that looked nothing like the feminist hustle-girl brand the company sold. Refinery29 co-founder Christene Barberich resigned in 2020 after staff detailed a toxic workplace where the feminism was decorative.

The pattern was consistent: a woman at the top of a company using feminist language to brand an organization that treated its workers—who were also predominantly women—the same way any other extractive employer would. The feminism was for the marketing. The structure was the same structure.

This is exactly what Koa Beck is getting at in White Feminism: it's not only about race, though race is central to it. It's about a feminism that seeks individual advancement within existing systems rather than transformation of those systems. It takes the ladder, pulls it up, and calls itself progress.

What "Girlboss Is Dead" Actually Means

I want to be precise here, because this part often gets confused.

The turn away from girlboss feminism is sometimes read as a turn toward passivity. Quiet quitting. "Soft life." Rest as an aesthetic. And some of that is just exhaustion—valid, understandable exhaustion from a generation that was told to work harder inside systems working against them, and is now sitting down.

But the more substantive version of what's replacing individual-ascension feminism is harder, not softer. It looks like:

Collective action instead of individual optimization. The Starbucks union drives, the Amazon organizing, the wave of graduate student unionization—these are overwhelmingly young, overwhelmingly include women and queer workers, and they're based on a different premise: you cannot optimize your way out of a structural condition, but you can build enough collective power to change the terms. That is harder than negotiating your own salary. It requires risking something.

Care economy politics instead of corporate pipeline politics. Paid family leave, universal childcare, fair wages for care workers—these are structural demands, not individual asks. The National Domestic Workers Alliance has been doing this work for years. It's not glamorous. It won't be featured in a brand's IWD campaign. It changes the material conditions of millions of women's lives.

Racial analysis built in from the start, not added on. The feminist frameworks doing useful work right now start with the recognition that a feminism that lifts white professional women while leaving domestic workers, farmworkers, and low-wage retail workers behind is not feminism—it's class solidarity for a particular class of women. This is not a new critique. Black feminist thinkers have been making it for the entire history of the mainstream feminist movement. It's finally getting more traction.

None of this is easier than leaning in. All of it requires more from you than buying a tote bag.

The IWD Coda (Four Days Out)

Sunday is International Women's Day. I wrote this morning about its actual origins—the garment workers, the strikes, the working-class women in the early 20th century who built this holiday out of demands for shorter hours, safer factories, and the right to vote.

Between those picket lines and this Sunday, something happened. The thing that happened has a name: it's the transformation of a political demand into a consumer moment. The privatization of a structural critique.

So before you buy something pink this weekend, I want you to sit with one question: Who is being asked to fix a structural problem with their personal behavior this year?

Who is being told that if she just works harder, leans more, optimizes better, celebrates harder, invests in herself more intentionally—equality will follow?

Because if the answer is women, and the person asking is a corporation with a brand partnership and a pink product line, you're not witnessing feminism. You're watching the ideology that told a generation of women that burnout was their fault run its next campaign.

The picket line version of this holiday had a different theory of change: power is not given. It is taken. And it is taken collectively.

That's still true.

Maya Kulkarni writes Feminist Focus from a drafty apartment in Philadelphia. Bell Hooks, the pitbull, is asleep under her desk.