What Was the ‘Girlboss’?

Ten years after the term shot through the zeitgeist, the woman who coined it is ready to bury it for good.

It’s strange to have created something that is entirely out of your control. Maybe even stranger when that thing has come to mean the exact opposite of the message you set out to deliver.

Such is the story of the “Girlboss” — a phrase, and then a book, and then a compliment, and then an insult, that exploded into the lexicon a decade ago with Sophia Amoruso’s bestselling business book, #Girlboss, and then a Netflix series, and was recently codified in the Merriam Webster Dictionary.

The term actually goes back way further, to an obscure genre of Japanese film called “pinky violence” that was popular in the 1970s. The films mixed action and erotica — and feature a recurring set of characters known as “delinquent girlbosses.” Amoruso, who once wanted to be a filmmaker, was a fan of the films — and when it came time to choose a title for her rags-to-riches business book, she thought they described her arc well: She’d worked as a stripper and made a living on petty theft before building a multimillion dollar fashion empire.

‘delinquent girlboss’ (noun; 1970s): recurring characters who mixed fighting and erotica in Japanese “pinky violence” films

‘girlboss’ (noun; 2000s): an ambitious and successful woman, especially a businesswoman, as popularized in the 2014 book by Sophia Amoruso

She added a hashtag to it, put herself on the book cover in blunt cut bangs, and the #Girlboss era was born. The book spent 18 weeks on the New York Times bestsellers list — inspiring a generation of women founders. Whitney Wolfe Herd, the founder of Bumble, has said she had a copy in the office when she was starting her company, which she took public in 2021, making her the youngest self-made female billionaire in history. Amoruso still gets messages daily from women who tell her she inspired them to start companies, quit jobs, leave abusive relationships, tattoo “Girlboss” on their forearms (really).

So what was a girlboss? In the book, Amoruso defined it simply: She was a woman “in charge of her own life,” one who “gets what she wants because she works for it” and who does it on her own terms. This was 2014, remember; back when Hillary Clinton still had a chance at being president, long before #MeToo or the Women’s March, when millennial pink seemed to be the color of our collective rose-colored glasses. And so, if the critique of Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In — which had come out a year prior — was that it taught women to rise in the corporate ranks by playing by men’s rules, then #Girlboss became the antidote; the scrappy, misfit younger sister who would forge her own path.

And yet today, to call somebody a “girlboss” is akin to calling her a corporate Karen — shorthand for a kind of craven millennial careerist who benefited from the same patriarchal systems she often promised to overturn. The word, once a compliment — plastered on Etsy mugs and T-shirts — has become an insult, a relic of a different era of ambition.

I have been fascinated by this strange rise and fall of the term for years now, and even more when many of the women that book inspired — who’d gone on to start businesses — were toppled from their companies. (They’d “girlbossed too close to the sun,” as the lingo goes.)

Today, it seems that almost every workplace “trend” that involves women and is not deemed pure unbridled ambition — whether it’s “quiet quitting” or “lazy girl jobs” or just lying in a pile of moss (“girlmossing”) in protest of hustle culture — is framed as the counterpoint to the girlboss.

Snail girl (noun): A snail girl, according to one woman interviewed by Fortune, is someone who has ditched her corporate girlboss job to “live like I’m retired.”

All of this brought me back to Sophia Amoruso, who, early last year, was thinking about pitching an op-ed on the subject. What about a profile instead, I countered — to mark the 10th anniversary of her book, and that strange moment in time?

That piece is out now, and it looks at what Amoruso is up to ten years on, but also how the whole girlboss phenomenon — charted through the rise and fall of that word — is really a story about how we treat women in leadership, and what happens when they screw up.

I hope (and Amoruso does too) that it’s the last time either of us will ever have to utter the word “girlboss” again.

Thanks for reading! -Jessica