The mid 2010s gave us a lot of things. Think Beyoncé’s Lemonade, millennial pink, and full glam cut crease looks. However, for modern women attempting to forge a career path at that time, there was no trend quite as significant as the #GirlBoss era of work. Fashioned under a banner of millennial pink-adorned offices and ‘The Future Is Female’ t-shirts, despite its slightly patronising moniker, the first iterations of the slogan were far from a simple marketing ploy.
For the first time, since the women’s labour movements in the late 1970s and the ‘You can have it all’ call to action of the nineties, women were being encouraged to ‘lean in’ and upscale their commitment to work. In response? The very real rise of female-founded companies, like Glossier, Fenty Beauty, and Sophia Amoruso’s aptly named Girlboss Media. By 2022, the burnout cliff created by the movement's toxic hustle culture and lack of intersectionality had sparked mainstream fatigue for the ideology.
Now, there’s no doubt that in 2026, the OG days of Girlboss-ing are officially as far behind us as cringy galaxy printed crop tops. However, with rising youth unemployment rates, trends like 9-5 to 5-9 filling our TikTok feeds and new players like Emma Grede, Lucy Guo and Luana Lopes Lara entering the cultural space, it seems as though the tide might be turning. Could we girlboss towards the sun again? According to some women, the answer is yes, but it’s complex.
“Ultimately, it’s not a way of working for everyone," says 25-year-old founder of Glazed PR, Georgina Curtis. “It’s not something that I recommend to people as the North star for career building, but as someone with dyslexia, being a ‘Girlboss’ was and has been about proving people who underestimate women like me wrong.”
Like many career-focused women, the PR founder and content creator was an early adopter of the movement’s ‘all or nothing’ approach to building her work-life. “I started out as a social and PR assistant at L'Oreal at 20 and left as a paid media manager because of my desire to progress quickly.”
At the end of her time with the beauty magnet, Curtis says there was “tension between me and some of the slightly older women in the company”. The brand owner says, “I was even described as ‘money hungry’ during a career conversation, which at the time felt laughable as I was living off beans and toast”. However, adds Curtis, “I think lots of this difference of opinion over my approach to working felt like a projection, one that came from their experience with the toxic elements of ‘girlbossing’”. Concern that Curtis tells Glamour, often felt “conflicting because you were being told not to work overtime or burn yourself out, but also the work structures are built as a way to force that kind of working via expectations."
It’s what served as the catalyst for the 25-year-old’s decision to set up her own business.“ I wanted to take control of my career, I wanted more,” says Curtis. “More without having to navigate the red tape that comes with other people being in charge of my career prospects.”
“I hate the word girlboss because it’s cringe, but right now, I run a female founder network of 250 women, and I’d happily say we are all girl bosses, because we are women who are strong and entrepreneurial.”
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Similarly, Abbianca Nassar, a 26-year-old journalist turned business owner, says, “I think the girlboss era got a bad rap when ultimately it has opened up the door for us to have more of a say in how we build our careers.”
For Nassar, who started her career at 15 with a self-published magazine, before becoming a reporter for the Evening Standard at 18, a traditional route to work was never a consideration.
“I was very aware, thanks to my own upbringing and financial awareness, that success was the only real option for me in order to achieve the life I wanted”, explains the 26-year-old.
“After interviewing a lot of venture capital firms and people in the US raising millions and millions, I remember thinking to myself, 'Wait a minute’, these people are on good money, and I'm working my arse off and not really earning as much. So I made the switch to sales”. Throughout her career, says Nassar, “I’ve remained money motivated, and I’ve been contributing to my family since I was 18, which has been part of the reason for my drive.”
It was a matter of “passion versus money”, Nassar tells Glamour. “As I was at a point in life where work was a really large chunk of my identity, an idea that reinforced the commission and money I made” However, like for many girlbosses, burnout followed.
“I’ve had to do a lot of inner work to find out what I valued outside of work, especially after leaving sales after a period of burnout and then going on to start up my own venture,” says Nassar. However, says the branding and sales psychology expert, “Being a ‘girlboss gave me something to build around.”
Now, as the business leader prepares to welcome her first child, she says, “This has been a learning curve. I tried to be a superwoman initially, but now I am more aware that I have to work around my energy levels”. Even so, Nassar says, her ‘girlboss’ attitude is not something she’s planning to temper. “Maternity pay isn’t great, and the career dip that occurs with taking time out to have a child is something that was a non-negotiable for me, so I’ve kept the momentum of my business going for the most part.”
Without the safety of her ‘girlbossed’ career, Nassar says, “I think I would have struggled with working a 9-5. I’ve heard awful stories about women being let go after returning to work, so I am aware that running my own thing gives me more choice”
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As for the toxic and harmful nature of the girlboss era’s approach to work-life balance, Nassar points out that negativity can go both ways. “I’ve had less than supportive responses from more traditionally minded women in my community when I’ve discussed my desire not to take my foot off the pedal during my pregnancy”. In turn, the brand founder says, “I now try to speak to other female founders who have kids as their perspective tends to align more, and the general consensus is that being a mother will actually make you a better manager because you don’t have time to waste. Hard boundaries need to exist in order to raise a human.”
Georgina, the founder of Glazed PR, admits that “I’ve suffered quite a massive blow to my social life as a result of my commitment to this way of working”. By finishing a University degree, building what has now become Glazed PR, freelancing, and coming to the end of her time at L'Oreal, Georgia says she reached her own period of burnout, which “ultimately led to me losing my entire friendship group.”
Georgia says it’s impossible not to note the gendered nature of this type of fallout in women’s social lives. “When I met my current boyfriend a few years ago. A recurring theme in the descriptions of him from mutual friends was his dedication to his work. How many times he's cancelled plans or stayed in,” which Curtis says “made him my perfect match, but those same traits are not deemed as something to admire or as a positive when exhibited by women.”
Venus Wong, a 33-year-old writer who grew up in China, credits her teenage obsession with The Devil Wears Prada and Japanese manga for inspiring her to pursue a career in fashion journalism.
During her time studying, Wong says, "The hustle was in the air. I had friends who were working at Macys, interning at ELLE magazine alongside a full course load, so I was inspired by the people around me to constantly be upping my game, but it wasn't ever in a toxic way.”
After graduating, Wong began working as a journalist right in the thick of the first wave of the Girlboss era. “I interned all throughout my course and landed a job at Refinery 29, working on content like their famed Money Diaries series, and overall, it felt hopeful.”
Thanks to Sophia Amoruso’s prominence on the website at the time, Wong says, “I had a front row seat to the rise of the movement, and my main takeaway from it when you sift through coverage of Sophia’s first wedding and other cringe elements, was that it made it cool to care about your career.”
Wong’s girlboss-ing looks a tad different from the shiny, trademarked version sold to women in the 2010s. “I’m confident in the career I built. I moved to the US and the UK without knowing anyone and I feel like I deserve to be here, especially as a woman of colour, so I own the fact that I hustle. Being able to chart my own way and have enough to treat my loved ones, is what my ‘girlbossing’ actually is for.”
Having a support network that understands this approach to work, especially in her personal life, is crucial, says Wong. “Motherhood is a scary concept, so my partner, whom I met even after swearing off dating during university in order to prioritise my career, is very aware that the idea that I’d have to put my career on the back burner, in order to become a mother, would be enough to make me not consider it.”
The concept of “being a girlboss is becoming acceptable again,” says Wong, because “we’ve gone through this stage of finding things embarrassing and cringe. Now we're at a place culturally where being yourself is the goal – regardless of if that’s being a super ambitious entrepreneur or someone that doesn’t want work to be a major part of their life”
It’s unlikely that both in name or momentum that ‘Girlbossing’ will ever return to the heights of its heyday, says Wong, because “I don’t think the term is cool enough for a comeback and I’ll even use ‘boy boss’ ironically when referring to my husband’s completing his to-do list”
However, says Wong, “Women have and still have to do lots of invisible labour, so regardless of how you feel about the label, we are all still ‘girlbossing’, even if it’s unconsciously.”
Beware of eclipse szn, folks.
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