Girl Boss: Stop Qualifying Success

GIRL BOSS

The empowering social media and pop culture movement girl boss to represent women’s financial independence and ambition, is secretly working against us. For tonight’s Sunday Pep Talk, I’m explaining why we need to stop qualifying success with gender and ditch the term girl boss.

WOMEN EMPOWER WOMEN

I grew up in a house full of girls, taught from a young age that we could do or be anything we wanted. Not in a Hallmark way, but in a genuine and fundamental way. [Read: my little sister is demolishing stereotypes as an architect in a historically male dominated industry at the largest firm in the world].

The mission behind The Identité Collective is to empower female entrepreneurs through beautiful branding and strategic web design. Female business owners amaze me with their ingenuity, creativity, empathy and adaptability.

PERSONAL EXPERIENCE

People have described me as a “total girl boss”. Meant to be a flattering tribute to a successful year, I feel a little sting every time. I have built a six figure business in less than a year, without investors or business partners. My success should be measured against all businesses, not just female owned ones.

Additionally my team and I work hard to ensure our clients become leaders in their industry, regardless of their gender. We hold ourselves and our clients to a high ethical and professional standard as humans, not just women.

For example, people would never describe a successful business man as a “man boss”. It literally sounds ridiculous. Why do we accept women being subjected to the qualifier?

WOMENS’ RIGHT ARE HUMAN RIGHTS

By qualifying someone’s success with the term girl boss, we’re subconsciously conforming to gender stereotypes and contributing to gender inequality. Men and women around the world are still working to bring true gender equality. While the girl boss movement stands for everything I believe in, the simple world “girl” can prove counterintuitive to the women’s rights movement.

LOOKING FORWARD

Let’s remove girl boss from our vocabulary. Celebrate other women’s success as success in business – not just female business. Remove the qualifier of “girl” boss when describing yourself. Give yourself proper credit for what you’ve built as a business person and never apologize for being powerful.

The Identité Collective is a full service creative studio for boutique lifestyle brands. Offering bespoke branding, web design and social media content creation, we help small businesses elevate their digital presence to become industry experts. Want to work together? Shoot us an inquiry here.