Becker's Hospital Review

43 WOMEN'S LEADERSHIP RIP 'girlboss' By Molly Gamble T he "girlboss" mode of female corporate empowerment was not made to sur- vive a national reckoning over racial injustice and the politics of power. e term, rarely appearing without its hashtag as #girlboss, stuck in the public lex- icon around 2014. And 2020 will mark its extinction, according to Amanda Mull in her essay for The Atlantic. From 2014 onward, to call a female execu- tive, founder or leader a "girlboss" was an intended compliment. The term implied that the professional success of ambitious young women who set out to hustle to the top (a) was entirely within their control and a matter of self-improvement and (b) marked progress toward equality. Further- more, the success of those women meant a smoother path toward success for wom- en below them. (In other words: "Babes empower babes," as a Girl Boss Collection T-shirt reads.) As it turns out, women who assume posi- tions of power — particularly when their ascent is primarily driven by their own sense of personal achievement — can be- have just as unethically and cruelly as men in positions of power. "Over time, accu- sations of sinister labor practices among prominent businesswomen who fit the girlboss template became more common," according to Ms. Mull, who details sever- al instances of female founders and leaders stepping down amid claims of harassment and mismanagement. But the problem is larger than "girlbosses be- having badly." is concept of empowerment is inherently problematic because it rests on the assumption that women, simply by nature of not being men, make a difference when they hold positions of power otherwise held by men in the same broken systems. As it turns out, the gender of a CEO does not, in and of itself, address discrepancies that have plagued American workers for genera- tions. If only it were that easy. "Making women the new men within corpo- rations was never going to be enough to ad- dress systemic racism and sexism, the erosion of labor rights, or the accumulation of wealth in just a few of the country's millions of hands — the broad abuses of power that afflict the daily lives of most people," wrote Ms. Mull. Exclusivity is the other factor driving girl- boss branding swiftly into irrelevance — and taking its self-improvement litera- ture and merchandise with it. Anyone can throw the word around, but it found a spe- cial place in the lexicon of white, millen- nial, affluent young professionals. It also became a calling card for recession-era young professionals to narrow their lens of empowerment to one thing: their ascent in the good old boys world of venture capital and corporate America. Racism, ageism, classism and other forms of prejudice were somebody else's problem. So is the end of girlboss a good thing? Yes, if it means we're broadening our lens to look at deeply flawed systems — not simply whether the person sitting in the corner office of them is a "girl." "e push to move beyond the girlboss is an acknowledgment that a slight expansion of college-educated women's access to ven- ture capital or mentoring opportunities was never a meaningful change to begin with, or an avenue via which meaningful change might be achieved," wrote Ms. Mull. "Ameri- ca's workplace problems don't begin and end with the identities of those atop corporate hierarchies — they're embedded in the hier- archies themselves." n One strategy to defend women from 'motherhood penalty' hits to pay By Molly Gamble T here is a way to curb the so-called "motherhood pen- alty," in which women's earnings fall after having chil- dren, according to research published June 24 from the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. In the U.S., women in heterosexual couples see their in- come drop by about 40 percent when they become moth- ers, whether due to staying home to care for the newborn, shifting to part-time status or other reasons. On average, new fathers in heterosexual relationships experience no comparable decline. USC economist Emily Nix, PhD, led a study based on data on earnings among heterosexual and same-sex female couples in Norway after the birth of their first child. In Nor- way, women in heterosexual couples saw their pay shrink by an average of 20 percent. The drop lasted for at least five years. In same-sex couples, the birth mother's income fell 13 percent after childbirth, along with a 5 percent drop for her partner. Within two years, the birth mother caught up with her partner. Within four years, the incomes of both mothers had fully recovered. Employers may believe paternity leave policies would help reduce the hit to mothers' earnings by supporting a more equitable division of parenting responsibilities and leave. Yet Dr. Nix found paternity leaves made no impact on the motherhood penalty. "If you want this to be your solution to the child penalty, it's not working," she notes. What can make a difference is subsidized child care. When Norwegian parents in the study had access to high-quality care when their child was a toddler, that support curbed the reduction in earnings by 25 percent. The benefit, how- ever, did not persist once child care stopped after age 3. "These results suggest that if policymakers wish to de- crease the child penalty, they should focus on providing better child care to families," the researchers wrote. n

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