Girlboss is a combination of the words
girl (“young woman”) and
boss. The term refers to a woman who acts as a boss by leading or owning a business.
The term
girlboss was popularized by businesswoman Sophia Amoruso in her 2015 book #
Girlboss. In the book, Amoruso uses the term
girlboss to refer to herself and generally to refer to any self-made woman who started her own successful business. For the next several years,
girlboss was mostly used as a positive, empowering term to refer to female CEOs and other women in positions of power in the business world.
Over time people began to argue that the term and concept of a
girlboss were being used to mask abusive business tactics as benevolent feminism, including by Amoruso herself.
A negative sense of
girlboss became especially popular when it began to be used in the “Gaslight, Gatekeep, Girlboss” meme that emerged in 2021. The meme ironically uses
girlboss alongside the negative terms
gatekeep and
gaslight to suggest that powerful women and men are creating toxic workplaces while disguising it as female empowerment.
This meme and other negative uses of
girlboss also caused it to be used ironically to describe silly, boring, or embarrassing acts done by women as being examples of empowerment.
Today, the negative and ironic senses of
girlboss are much more commonly used than the positive one.