Cringeworthily cutesy though they may seem to some now, the terms were meant to be empowering and enabling. The irony is that along with words like “momtrepreneur” and “she-EO”, girl boss was originally intended to address precisely this. What amazes me most is that nobody questioned the ad during the approval process either there were no women involved or there was no space for a female perspective.” What it boils down to, she says, is a diversity problem. How? By removing the word “girl”.Īs Frankie Cotton, an entrepreneur and host of the podcast Women on Top, noted in a telephone interview: “Just taking ‘girl’ out is almost laughable. While conceding that it might have "come across as sexist and demeaning to women", the company said that along with issuing an apology on its website, it had already tweaked the ad. And if it seems depressing that PeoplePerHour signed off on it in the first place, the company’s response failed to defuse the row. Of course, for anyone who’s even passingly familiar with the tech industry’s deep-rooted woman problem, the ad was regrettably on-brand. Through its “patronising” image of a woman running a business, it ruled, the advertisement “perpetuated harmful gender stereotypes”. As it was, the ad seemed patronising and sexist – just two of the adjectives flung at PeoplePerHour by blue-tick Twitter users. My vagina has nothing to do with it.” Emma Sexton, who happens to be the CEO of a creative B2B agency as well as a broadcaster, came up with some helpful alternate wording: “You be the CEO, we’ll do the SEO”. As tech CEO Lisa Myers tweeted at the time, “I’m the BOSS of an SEO Agency. Unsurprisingly, the advert triggered a flood of social media outrage. After all, what girl – or grown woman even – is capable of grappling with technology like search engine optimisation? Or maybe she was just semaphoring coy feminine compliance, because the words that accompanied the image were the verbal equivalent of a pat on the head: “You do the girl boss thing we’ll do the SEO thing”. The ad, which appeared widely across the London Underground network at the end of last year, showed a red-haired young woman looking smilingly down at something off-camera, presumably her laptop.
Using freshly minted powers, the UK watchdog earlier this month banned an advert for PeoplePerHour, an online platform that connects freelancers with businesses. At least, that’s what a recent ruling by the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) suggests. Fast-forward a mere half dozen years and this particular formulation looks to have evolved into just another linguistic tool of oppression, doing the very opposite of what it was intended for: denigrating rather than celebrating, patronising rather than promoting. Still, language is nothing if not fluid, and neologisms like “girl boss” are no exception. As a rallying cry for a generation of young women who might not otherwise have thought to start their own businesses, #girlboss bore countless hopes, dreams and gleefully hard-nosed aspirations out into the ether. That name was borrowed from a 1975 Betty Davis album, but with “girl boss” she signalled a defiantly female rebellion against the likes of ’80s power dressing trends (what were shoulder pads if not an attempt to give a woman a more masculine silhouette?).
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Adding a hashtag prefix, she sent it rocketing into public consciousness as the title of her autobiography, a bestseller that later became a TV series, and that described her transformation of an eBay vintage store into the multi-million-dollar fashion brand that is Nasty Gal. Back in 2014, American entrepreneur Sophia Amoruso popularised the word “girl boss”.
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