Devils Don't Always Wear Prada

The “girlboss” is back. The term, popularized in the 2014 book Girlboss, once positively connoted a woman who adopted traditional male-coded modes of doing business, but without discarding her aesthetic femininity. Very much a compliment to Sheryl Sandberg’s advice to Lean In (2013), the theory behind girl-bossing was that differences between women and men were mostly aesthetic and stylistic, not psychological or characterological. The 2014 girlboss might have been a mother, for example, but her career would come first regardless. The opposite of a 2014 girlboss was the woman who “stepped back.” In other words, the woman who, per Ann Marie Slaughter’s description in Why Women Still Can’t Have It All, ultimately put her familial and domestic obligations ahead of her professional ambitions.