Girlboss

What someone in two hundred years would need to know to understand it.

Originated 2014 · Sophia Amoruso's 2014 memoir #GIRLBOSS, then Instagram, Twitter, Tumblr and TikTok · Also known as #GIRLBOSS; girl boss; girlbossing; Gaslight, Gatekeep, Girlboss

What it is

Girlboss is an English slang word for a woman who runs her own business or climbs fast at work, usually with confidence and a bit of glamour. In the mid 2010s it was used sincerely, as praise, on books, mugs, adverts and social media posts. By about 2020 most people used it sarcastically, to describe a woman who borrows the language of women's rights to sell things or to excuse treating her staff badly.

Where it came from

Sophia Amoruso, who founded the online clothes shop Nasty Gal, called her 2014 memoir #GIRLBOSS. The # made it a hashtag: a tag people added to posts on social media sites so others could find them by searching. The book sold well, and Netflix turned it into a TV series in 2017, which was cancelled after one season. Brands, magazines and Instagram accounts picked the word up to sell to women. Nasty Gal had gone bankrupt in 2016, and in 2020 several women who ran well-known companies resigned after staff accused them of running toxic or racist workplaces. That's when the sarcastic meaning took over.

How people used it

At first people tagged their own posts with #girlboss: a photo of a new laptop, a desk with a pink notebook, the launch of a small business. Companies printed it on T-shirts and used it in adverts. Later it turned into a joke verb. Saying "she's girlbossing" meant a woman was doing something selfish or ruthless and calling it empowerment. People applied it to film villains and to real executives in trouble, such as Elizabeth Holmes, founder of the blood-testing company Theranos, who was tried for fraud in 2021. Calling her a girlboss was praise and mockery at once, and the reader was meant to laugh at both.

Why it mattered

It gave people one word for an argument many of them were already having: does a woman getting rich and powerful count as a win for women in general, or only for her? Younger people angry about low pay and high rent found the sincere version embarrassing, and mocking it was a quick way to say so. It also shows how fast a slogan could flip once enough people online decided it was funny. Amoruso herself tweeted in 2022 asking people to stop using the word. They didn't, but by then almost every use was a joke.

The jokes around it

• "Gaslight, Gatekeep, Girlboss": a fake motto. Gaslighting means making someone doubt their own memory, gatekeeping means keeping others out of a group.
• "She girlbossed too close to the sun": said of a woman whose ruthless rise ended in disaster, often Elizabeth Holmes.
• "Boss babe": the sincere cousin, much used by women recruiting friends into schemes selling make-up or leggings.
• "Girlboss feminism": the critics' name for feminism that cares mostly about individual women reaching the top.

What noah thinks it shows about us

People online were quick to notice when a cause was being used to sell them things, and their response was to keep using the word until it meant the opposite. Girlboss went from a book cover to an insult in about six years, mostly through repetition by people who didn't like it.

What noah is not sure of

The exact origin of "Gaslight, Gatekeep, Girlboss" is unclear; it's usually credited to Tumblr or Twitter around 2020 to 2021. The year of Amoruso's tweet asking people to stop is taken from the specimen text (2022) and may be off. The phrase "girl boss" existed in scattered use before 2014.

Noah wrote these when he decided to keep this. They’re stored in the Ark as context.txt and count towards its size limit.