# Girlboss
**Girlboss** (also written girl boss) is a slang term for an entrepreneurial, ambitious woman, especially one who runs her own business, that was popularized by [Sophia Amoruso](https://www.edgepedia.org/sophia-amoruso)'s 2014 book *#Girlboss* and later turned ironic, becoming a shorthand for performative empowerment and corporate feminism.[1](https://wordhistories.net/2024/10/24/girlboss/) • [2](https://www.socialync.io/glossary/girlboss) The Oxford English Dictionary, whose online edition of September 2024 carries the word, notes that it is often preceded by a hashtag, reflecting its use in the title of Amoruso's book and its spread as a social media topic.[1](https://wordhistories.net/2024/10/24/girlboss/)
| Key fact | Detail |
|---|---|
| Core meaning | An entrepreneurial, ambitious woman, especially one who runs her own business (OED, September 2024)[1](https://wordhistories.net/2024/10/24/girlboss/) |
| Popularizer | Sophia Amoruso (born 1984), founder of the fashion retailer Nasty Gal, in her 2014 memoir *#Girlboss*[1](https://wordhistories.net/2024/10/24/girlboss/) • [3](https://techcrunch.com/2022/06/03/girlboss-era-myth-toxic-harms-women-tech-startups-ceo-founder/) |
| Earlier print use | "Girl boss" appears in American newspapers as early as 1895; the OED's earliest recorded one-word use is from the *Hartford Courant*, 31 January 1994[1](https://wordhistories.net/2024/10/24/girlboss/) |
| Positive phase | Media coverage of women entrepreneurs was largely celebratory from 2014 until about 2016–17; #GirlBoss passed 2.5 million Instagram hashtag posts by 2017[4](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S088390262500014X) |
| Backlash markers | Nasty Gal's 2016 bankruptcy, the 2021 "Gaslight, Gatekeep, Girlboss" meme, and Amoruso's own 2022 request that people stop using the word[3](https://techcrunch.com/2022/06/03/girlboss-era-myth-toxic-harms-women-tech-startups-ceo-founder/) • [5](https://www.dictionary.com/culture/pop-culture/girlboss) |
| Current use | Mostly negative or ironic: mocking ruthless or toxic women leaders, or describing mundane acts as if they were empowering[5](https://www.dictionary.com/culture/pop-culture/girlboss) |
## Meanings and usage
In its original sense, a girlboss is a self-made woman who owns or leads a company, and the term served as praise for women who succeeded in male-dominated industries.[5](https://www.dictionary.com/culture/pop-culture/girlboss) It is formed from girl plus boss, and can also function as a verb meaning to act like a girlboss.[5](https://www.dictionary.com/culture/pop-culture/girlboss)
The negative sense describes a woman who sees herself as heroic while using the same ruthless tactics as powerful businessmen, particularly when she creates a toxic work environment for other female employees. From there, the word took on an ironic use, describing silly, boring, or embarrassing acts done by women as if they were empowering.[5](https://www.dictionary.com/culture/pop-culture/girlboss) A complementary coinage, **girlfailure**, denotes "an absolute loser of a female character" and spread from a viral tweet in January 2023, after first appearing on Tumblr in 2021.[6](https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/girlboss)
## Etymology and earlier uses
The compound is older than its 2014 fame. The earliest occurrence the OED records of the one-word form is a *Hartford Courant* article of 31 January 1994 describing Beverly Tuttle, president and CEO of a [Connecticut](https://www.edgepedia.org/connecticut) credit counseling service, as a "girl boss" loading her staff onto a bus for a training day.[1](https://wordhistories.net/2024/10/24/girlboss/) The two-word phrase goes back further: the researcher Pascal Tréguer found a Cincinnati Enquirer item titled "A GIRL BOSS" dated 20 January 1895, followed by turn-of-the-century American newspaper uses for women running stores, stonemasonry crews, and mail distribution.[1](https://wordhistories.net/2024/10/24/girlboss/)
## Sophia Amoruso and the 2014 breakthrough
The modern currency of the term comes from Amoruso's 2014 memoir *#Girlboss*, which chronicled her path from selling vintage clothing to running the fashion website [Nasty Gal](https://www.edgepedia.org/nasty-gal) and was later adapted into a Netflix series.[1](https://wordhistories.net/2024/10/24/girlboss/) • [3](https://techcrunch.com/2022/06/03/girlboss-era-myth-toxic-harms-women-tech-startups-ceo-founder/) • [7](https://www.lemonde.fr/m-perso/article/2024/04/10/la-girlboss-cette-neofeministe-super-carrieriste_6226965_4497916.html) Amoruso used the word to refer to herself and to self-made women generally, and the media quickly associated it with women entrepreneurs and feminine success more broadly.[5](https://www.dictionary.com/culture/pop-culture/girlboss) • [8](https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jbusvent.2025.106486) In a 2017 Instagram milestone, the #GirlBoss hashtag passed 2.5 million posts.[4](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S088390262500014X)
The archetype's business fortunes collapsed quickly. Amoruso stepped down as CEO the year after her book appeared, and Nasty Gal filed for bankruptcy in 2016 and was purchased by Boohoo; she later founded a company called Girlboss, from which she stepped down in 2020.[3](https://techcrunch.com/2022/06/03/girlboss-era-myth-toxic-harms-women-tech-startups-ceo-founder/)
## The hype cycle
A 2025 study in the *Journal of Business Venturing* analyzed 2,671 newspaper, trade magazine, and blog articles published between 2014 and 2023 to reconstruct how the narrative rose and fell.[4](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S088390262500014X) Until 2016 or 2017 the prevailing depiction was celebratory, aligning with neoliberal and postfeminist ideals and emphasizing empowerment, ambition, and breaking the mold; figures such as Amoruso and Theranos founder [Elizabeth Holmes](https://www.edgepedia.org/elizabeth-holmes) were initially held up as symbols of emancipation and success.[8](https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jbusvent.2025.106486) • [9](https://phys.org/news/2025-12-media-hype-fall-girlboss-entrepreneur.pdf) The contradictions the coverage had ignored, including an early habit of focusing on women leaders' appearance and personal trivia, later became material for backlash when high-profile failures exposed how hard it was to meet every expectation at once.[8](https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jbusvent.2025.106486)
The clearest symbolic turning point was the 2021 meme "Gaslight, Gatekeep, Girlboss", a parody of "Live, Laugh, Love" that paired the word with negative terms to suggest that powerful women create toxic workplaces while disguising it as empowerment.[5](https://www.dictionary.com/culture/pop-culture/girlboss) • [7](https://www.lemonde.fr/m-perso/article/2024/04/10/la-girlboss-cette-neofeministe-super-carrieriste_6226965_4497916.html) Amoruso herself disowned the label, tweeting "Please stop using the word Girlboss thank you" on 1 June 2022, and told *Elle* in 2024 that she would prefer never to utter the word again.[3](https://techcrunch.com/2022/06/03/girlboss-era-myth-toxic-harms-women-tech-startups-ceo-founder/) • [10](https://femfounded.org/culture/the-rise-and-fall-of-the-girlboss/)
## Girlboss feminism as a scholarly concept
Academic writers have treated girlboss as more than a meme. According to Frankie Mastrangelo's 2021 dissertation, girlboss feminism names emerging, media-based strands of neoliberal feminism in which empowerment for women is measured by monetary achievement, competing in the marketplace, a self-managed balance of work and life, and carefully shaped online and offline personas powered by turning oneself into a revenue source.[11](https://scholarscompass.vcu.edu/etd/6648/) On this reading, girlboss feminism may open individual opportunities for stability and advancement, but its proliferation helps perpetuate the inequalities required to sustain racial capitalism, and it promotes a feminism divorced from collective, intersectional struggle.[11](https://scholarscompass.vcu.edu/etd/6648/) Related work situates the girl boss as a postfeminist "sexual contract" offered to women through prescriptive forms of feminine agency, extending the sociologist Angela McRobbie's account of postfeminism.[12](https://doi.org/10.1177/13675494241268123) Critics also connect the term to commodity activism, in which brands turned feminism into a marketable aesthetic, and to the observation that it propagated a form of feminism centered on privileged, largely white women.[13](https://www.pvcc.edu/sites/default/files/Insights%20Vol%206-compressed.pdf) • [14](https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/19394225231209275)
Reporting on women in technology has made a parallel practical critique: the girlboss stereotype was applied almost exclusively to a small cohort of affluent white millennial founders, even though less than 2% of United States venture capital funding went to all-female founding teams in 2021, and the label became a reductive stereotype that distracts from systemic issues in corporate culture.[3](https://techcrunch.com/2022/06/03/girlboss-era-myth-toxic-harms-women-tech-startups-ceo-founder/)
## Legacy
The word has outlived the enthusiasm that produced it. Merriam-Webster lists it, and it now survives mostly as a meme, a punchline, and a shorthand for a particular 2010s version of feminism that people hold complicated feelings about; a generation more critical of capitalism and empowerment feminism treats it as a joke rather than an aspiration.[10](https://femfounded.org/culture/the-rise-and-fall-of-the-girlboss/) • [15](https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/4D02E3A6C622C1B43A2459BDB9D06AA7/9781009785808AR.pdf/gendered_neologisms_and_social_transformation.pdf) Commentators have described burnout feminism as replacing the girlboss era associated with [Sheryl Sandberg](https://www.edgepedia.org/sheryl-sandberg)'s *Lean In*, and the episode is now cited as a case study in how online discourse can recontextualize a once-celebratory label into a sarcastic one.[16](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-02-16/why-burnout-feminism-is-replacing-the-girlboss-lean-in-era) • [15](https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/4D02E3A6C622C1B43A2459BDB9D06AA7/9781009785808AR.pdf/gendered_neologisms_and_social_transformation.pdf)
## References
1. ["'girlboss': meaning and origin", Word Histories (Pascal Tréguer), 24 October 2024](https://wordhistories.net/2024/10/24/girlboss/)
2. ["What Does Girlboss Mean?", Socialync glossary](https://www.socialync.io/glossary/girlboss)
3. [Amanda Silberling and Anita Ramaswamy, "How the myth of the 'girlboss' harms emerging women in tech", TechCrunch, 3 June 2022](https://techcrunch.com/2022/06/03/girlboss-era-myth-toxic-harms-women-tech-startups-ceo-founder/)
4. ["The rise and fall of the girlboss: Gender, social expectations and entrepreneurial hype", Journal of Business Venturing, Vol. 40, Issue 4, July 2025](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S088390262500014X)
5. ["girlboss", Pop Culture Dictionary, Dictionary.com](https://www.dictionary.com/culture/pop-culture/girlboss)
6. ["Girlboss", Know Your Meme](https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/girlboss)
7. ["La « girlboss », cette néoféministe supercarriériste", Le Monde, 10 April 2024](https://www.lemonde.fr/m-perso/article/2024/04/10/la-girlboss-cette-neofeministe-super-carrieriste_6226965_4497916.html)
8. ["The rise and fall of the girlboss: Gender, social expectations and entrepreneurial hype", ScienceDirect summary](https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jbusvent.2025.106486)
9. ["Media hype shapes rise and fall of the 'girlboss' entrepreneur narrative", Phys.org, December 2025](https://phys.org/news/2025-12-media-hype-fall-girlboss-entrepreneur.pdf)
10. ["How 'Girlboss' Went From Bestseller to Punchline", FemFounded, updated 5 April 2026](https://femfounded.org/culture/the-rise-and-fall-of-the-girlboss/)
11. [Frankie Mastrangelo, "Theorizing #Girlboss Culture: Mediated Neoliberal Feminisms from Influencers to Multi-level Marketing Schemes", PhD dissertation, Virginia Commonwealth University, 2021](https://scholarscompass.vcu.edu/etd/6648/)
12. [Tinca Lukan and Marni Appleton, "Unveiling the girl boss sexual contract: A multimodal discourse analysis of female influencers in the United Kingdom, Sweden and Slovenia", European Journal of Cultural Studies, 2025](https://doi.org/10.1177/13675494241268123)
13. ["#Girlbossing Our Way Back in Time: The Shift in Feminism from a Collective to an Individual Movement", Insights, Piedmont Virginia Community College](https://www.pvcc.edu/sites/default/files/Insights%20Vol%206-compressed.pdf)
14. [Taylor Cavallo and Joshua C. Collins, "The Death of the Girlboss: Critical Feminist Epistemology and Implications for Human Resource Development", 2024](https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/19394225231209275)
15. ["Gendered Neologisms and Social Transformation", Cambridge University Press](https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/4D02E3A6C622C1B43A2459BDB9D06AA7/9781009785808AR.pdf/gendered_neologisms_and_social_transformation.pdf)
16. ["Why 'Burnout' Feminism Is Replacing the Girlboss, Lean In Era", Bloomberg, 16 February 2026](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-02-16/why-burnout-feminism-is-replacing-the-girlboss-lean-in-era)
---
*Topic: Encyclopedia › Society and history › Social life and human behavior › Relationships and social issues › Gender and feminism*
*Initially written Sep 17, 2026 · Reviewed: Sep 17, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026*
*Copyright 2026 EdgeChat AI, a subsidiary of Biostate AI.*
License: Edgepedia Community License 1.0, https://www.edgepedia.org/edgepedia/license