Girl Boss

How to Be Successful Without Hurting Men’s Feelings: Non-Threatening Leadership Strategies for Women
by Sarah Cooper
Published 1 Nov 2018

To head off some of these inane situations, make sure your pitch deck is airtight. Any pitch deck you create should include these ten slides. One great way to remove the sting of being a powerful woman is to give yourself a cute, feminine title that reminds investors that yes, you are a leader, but you are also still a woman. Some options are: Girl Boss Lady Boss She-EO Business Mogulette Parentrepreneur Mompreneur Womantrepreneur Estrogentreprenuer Investors follow patterns when trying to figure out what to invest in, and one of those patterns is that most successful CEOs are white men. Inventing a fake white male cofounder will match the pattern and bring legitimacy to your business idea.* And, beyond the pitch meeting, you can use your fake founder for business communications when you’d like to actually get a response to your email.

Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism: And Other Arguments for Economic Independence
by Kristen R. Ghodsee
Published 20 Nov 2018

Discrimination against women in leadership has little basis in differential skill sets and more to do with social attitudes about women in power. So this is not about putting less qualified women into leadership positions because they are female; it’s about trying to counteract the deep, unconscious gender stereotypes about men as leaders and women as followers. Some people just feel weird with a girl boss.21 We don’t associate women with positions of authority because we’ve seen so few of them. And because there are so few women in positions of authority, both men and women continue to associate leadership with male bodies, a vicious cycle that is hard to break out of. (A similar problem can be found for women in the sciences, engineering, and tech.)

Cultish: The Language of Fanaticism
by Amanda Montell
Published 14 Jun 2021

You might think that an industry as unhip and retro-seeming as direct sales might have gone out of style already. It’s hard to believe it’s survived the internet, where so many ex-MLMers put these companies on blast, spilling their stories of psychological abuse and money loss. Search “MLM scam” on YouTube, and endless pages of videos like “The MLM ‘Girl Boss’ Narrative Is a Lie,” “I Filed for Bankruptcy After LuLaRoe and Now Work 2 Jobs,” and “AMWAY: The Final Straw (with Audio EVIDENCE!)—How I Quit My MLM Cult” accumulate millions of views. Anti-MLMers occupy passionate nooks of Instagram and TikTok. In 2020, TikTok banned MLM recruiters from the platform altogether.

How to Work Without Losing Your Mind
by Cate Sevilla
Published 14 Jan 2021

And while, yes, it was wonderful still to have new things being created in a time of grief and isolation, there is also a big difference between doing things out of true service for your community and for those in need, and just perpetuating a habit of needing to be constantly on, of creating and serving your ego, and desperately trying to keep up with the capitalistic churn of social media. In early 2020, back in the old normal, the Advertising Standards Authority actually banned an advert from the company People Per Hour for gender stereotyping.4 It featured a smiling woman next to the slogan ‘You do the girl boss thing. We’ll do the SEO thing.’ They apologized, admitting it ‘might come across as sexist and demeaning to women’ and said it was taking steps to remove ‘girl’ from the advert. The term ‘girlboss’ was made known to most by Nasty Gal founder Sophia Amoruso with her 2014 business memoir called #GIRLBOSS.

Everyday Utopia: What 2,000 Years of Wild Experiments Can Teach Us About the Good Life
by Kristen R. Ghodsee
Published 16 May 2023

But while some of the fiercest resistance to changes in the way we organize domesticity originates from people like the late professor of literature Mitchell Kalpakgian, who asserted the “self-evident truth of the natural law that man and woman are created for each other in love and marriage and for the procreation and education of children,”30 it is complemented by the ideological warfare waged in defense of the nuclear family by market fundamentalists. These strident defenders of capitalism consider all challenges to the status quo as potentially destabilizing factors to the social systems that underpin the free market. Some things, like girl boss liberal feminist demands to break the glass ceiling or expanding the legal institution of marriage to same-sex couples, pose no real threat to conservative interests as long as the work of bringing up the next generation remains in the private sphere. But other sorts of demands prove more difficult to commodify or co-opt, especially those that change people’s expectations about how society should be organized.

Tools of Titans: The Tactics, Routines, and Habits of Billionaires, Icons, and World-Class Performers
by Timothy Ferriss
Published 6 Dec 2016

Favorite Films and TV Shows Documentaries and TV series are noted in parentheses. Any entry lacking parentheses is a fictional film. Adams, Scott: Whitey: United States of America v. James J. Bulger (doc) Altucher, James: High on Crack Street: Lost Lives in Lowell (doc), Hoop Dreams (doc), Comedian (doc) Amoruso, Sophia: The Color of Pomegranates, Girl Boss Guerilla Andreessen, Marc: Mr. Robot (TV), Halt and Catch Fire (TV), Silicon Valley (TV) Attia, Peter: Pumping Iron (doc), The Bridge (doc), Bigger, Stronger, Faster (doc) Beck, Glenn: Citizen Kane Betts, Richard: The Breakfast Club, Baraka (doc) Birbiglia, Mike: Tickled (doc), Captain Fantastic, Other People, Terms of Endearment, Broadcast News, Stop Making Sense, No Refunds (Doug Stanhope comedy special) Blumberg, Alex: Man on Wire (doc), Hoop Dreams (doc), Magic and Bird: A Courtship of Rivals (doc) Boone, Amelia: The Goonies Boreta, Justin: Meru (doc), Grizzly Man (doc), Daft Punk Unchained (doc) Brach, Tara: Race: The Power of an Illusion (doc), Breaking Bad (TV) Callen, Bryan: Fed Up (doc), Ken Burns’s Baseball (doc), Ken Burns’s Jazz (doc) Carl, Shay: Captain Fantastic, Transcendent Man (doc), Forks over Knives (doc), big fan of the documentary filmmaker Morgan Spurlock Cooke, Ed: Withnail and I, The Armando Iannucci Shows (TV), Monty Python’s Flying Circus (TV), Alan Partridge (fictional personality) Costner, Kevin: Coney Island (doc), E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, Jaws, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, The Sugarland Express, Minority Report Cummings, Whitney: Buck (doc), Comedian (doc) D’Agostino, Dominic: “An Advantaged Metabolic State: Human Performance, Resilience and Health” (talk by Peter Attia at IHMC) de Botton, Alain: Seven Up!