Is the independent girlboss dead? Maybe she never existed to begin with.
The release of Lindy West’s latest cringeworthy memoir, Adult Braces—about how her husband out-woked her into becoming the side chick in her own marriage—has prompted an intra-leftist firing squad about who bears responsibility for the girlboss’ dimming appeal to younger women.
The Atlantic published an essay by Helen Lewis declaring the “Death of Millennial Feminism,” while in Slate Jill Filipovic defended the girlboss ideal against what she calls an “absolutely enormous antifeminist backlash within which we are all living.” They both take for granted, however, that the girlboss has declined from her cultural primacy. That may be so, but she’s taken no comparable hammering in the world of public policy.
Whether the millennial image of the girlboss, with its shrill first-person confessional style, is fading into cheugy-ness with the inevitable generational pendulum swing, the cornerstone of her appeal, “independence” from men and family, has never been so popular. On Reddit’s infamous r/relationships subreddit, half of all advice given amounts to “leave,” up from 30 percent in 2010 and still climbing. Nearly half of Gen Z choose financial independence over romance when surveyed, and nearly three times as many Americans say having a career they enjoy is more important than getting married or having children. In a 2023 submission to the New York Times’s execrable “Modern Love” series, divorcee Maggie Smith exhorts women “never” to be financially dependent on a man.
A few dissenters reject the framing of dependence as bad—or even avoidable at all. Leah Libresco Sargeant, for instance, lays out the case for interdependence in her well-titled book The Dignity of Dependence. But for most, dependence within the family unit is opposed to independence. A woman who is not financially dependent on her husband or her father is presumed to be free.
The reality is more complicated, and not just emotionally.
The image of the working woman, the girlboss, remains the sine qua non of independence. After all, she pays her own bills using money she earned herself, or so it seems. But dig into the details and one learns she is propped up from every angle by laws, taxpayer dollars, and the ability to externalize the costs of her lifestyle onto others. In other words, the girlboss is often as much a dependent as Betty Draper, but her dependence is less honest, laundered through public policy.
President Barack Obama ran an infamous 2012 campaign ad, mocked by conservatives, about the “Life of Julia,” a woman dependent on government at every turn. That model could be renamed for millennial girlbosses as the “Life of Jessica”: a cycle of dependence on institutions and structures that allegedly liberate women from the patriarchal boot but instead merely redistribute and conceal their dependence.
Let’s start with the outsourcing of domestic labor that became normative by the end of the 1970s. Someone has to cook, clean, and look after the children. Some of the slack continues to be picked up by women working the “double shift,” a full-time job outside the home while being the primary homemaker (an arrangement maligned by feminists as yet another unfair burden placed on women by the patriarchy, though it is more realistically a result of women’s higher standards for domestic order). But even the women “having it all” often cannot keep up with the double burden. Thus women leaving the home en masse created a demand for a servant class at rates affordable to the median-wage household—a demand met by lax immigration policies.
In major cities such as New York and Los Angeles, up to half the nannies on the books are immigrants, and the real number is likely higher, with many skirting labor laws. The profile of other domestic task-replacers looks similar, with cheap delivery services such as DoorDash and Grubhub, staples for two-income households too harried to cook dinner, incentivizing an enormous black market that rents verified accounts to illegal immigrants.
This creates externalities. Even accounting for the downward pressure on wages from high rates of legal and illegal migrant labor, the care of young children is so expensive that its normalization as a major expense for the average family creates political pressure to transfer at least some of those costs to the taxpayer. New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani capitalized on this during his campaign, promising a “free childcare” plan similar to what Sen. Bernie Sanders has proposed on the federal level. Less quantifiable than the tax hike are the societal costs of the negative behavioral effects of all-day non-parental care for young children, the effects of dual income stress on marriage, and the diminished life outcomes of children raised in such arrangements.
The widespread replacement of home-cooked meals also has ripple effects. The streets of our cities are more dangerous, with delivery bikers weaving frantically through traffic. People are so accustomed to unhealthy restaurant food that the Food and Drug Administration has to preach back-to-basics messages such as “eat real food.”
Then there are the girlboss jobs themselves. While millions of women create real value in the economy and deserve their paychecks, it’s impossible not to notice the wild proliferation of “email jobs” and administrative compliance positions that don’t add to the company bottom line (David Graeber famously called them “bullshit jobs” in his bestselling book of the same title), jobs disproportionately filled by the fairer sex.
In 1991, reforms to the Civil Rights Act ensured that lawsuits over (often spurious) sexual harassment claims in the workplace became a major cash cow for litigants. Companies responded by bending the knee to the most easily offended, kicking off the era of “political correctness” and spawning an enormous industry that trains employees not to harass one another. These reforms also raised the stakes for employers to prove they were not discriminating on the basis of sex or race in their hiring and promotion practices, pushing them well beyond meritocracy into de facto affirmative action for women and minorities.
Even more pernicious is the proliferation of Soviet commissar-style jobs, both in the nonprofit and for-profit sectors, that exist primarily to enforce political agendas rather than to produce value. In the U.S., the number of human resources jobs, three-quarters of which are filled by women, has exploded, roughly doubling from 2014 to 2024. It’s unlikely that managing a payroll has become commensurately burdensome in the past ten years; those additional roles exist to enforce diversity laws. The entire DEI complex is a giant subsidy for make-work positions staffed by women and racial minorities.
That takeover has big consequences for work culture, as Helen Andrews’s viral essay “The Great Feminization” argues. Crucially, these shifts were inorganic, demanded by civil rights enforcement and big payouts against those clinging to the idea that sex and race should be irrelevant to hiring decisions. As Andrews summarizes: “Women can sue their bosses for running a workplace that feels like a fraternity house, but men can’t sue when their workplace feels like a Montessori kindergarten.”
Earlier in the life of the girlboss resides an even more obvious source of her dependency: universities. Higher education is disproportionately attended and staffed by women. It is also funded in large part by the taxpayer, with an output that adds to cultural revolution more than to the wealth of nations.
Female students earn just under 60 percent of bachelor’s degrees, and similar proportions of master’s and PhDs. Given that women more often choose lower-paid majors such as gender studies and communications, as opposed to structural engineering and computer science, it’s little surprise that the student debt crisis is itself a disproportionately female phenomenon. Women hold two-thirds of outstanding student debt, nearly all of which has been financed by the federal government. Unless serious policy changes are made to defuse this debt bomb, the high default rates will ultimately fall on the taxpayer, through whom the government already owns 93 percent of student loans.
Illegal domestic labor, promotion under threat of lawsuit, and billions in taxpayer-subsidized student loans are not the picture of independence that TikToks celebrating “Gen Z boss and a mini” would have us believe.
On the other side of the expense ledger are those benefits society loses when women choose en masse to work in the office.
The quality of teaching, traditionally a feminine profession at least until the college level, has collapsed along a timeline that suggests that diverting talented women into higher-paid careers was the cause. Let’s posit for the sake of argument that it’s better for those ambitious and intelligent women to be lawyers instead of shaping the future minds of both sexes in the classroom. Is it better for society as a whole that teaching has been relegated to a low-scoring backup plan, that still remains predominately female?
Volunteering and philanthropy, on the other hand, once the province of Gilded Age heiresses and women with grown-up children, have been professionalized, through correspondingly multiplying female-staffed NGOs. In short, the feminine impulse toward empathy that used to be predominantly applied to solve problems in one’s community has been transformed into permanent activism as a career. Instead of the Daughters of the American Revolution raising town statues, we have women whose career advancement depends on tearing them down.
Modern life has an atomization problem, from Bowling Alone to the sharp decline in sex, friendship, and civil society among younger generations. Less discussed is the role played by neighborhoods emptied out when women went to work, with the attendant collapse of past fixtures such as dinner parties, block organizations, church volunteering, and informal networks of adults who kept an eye out for kids with more freedom to roam. These are social, rather than individual, consequences, and everyone has to grapple with them, regardless of the personal decisions a woman makes in her own life.
For better or worse, there is no “retvrn” to the past, and I’m certainly not suggesting we try to resurrect traditionalism by force of law. I think the more likely path for social evolution will involve more work-from-home flexibility, more homeschooling, and more startup communities.
But let’s be clear: The status quo is maintained by a network of laws and policies that push women out of the home and into the workforce. Women who would prefer to work part-time or not at all while their children are young—still the substantial majority—must make heavy sacrifices to do so, sacrifices that were unnecessary forty or fifty years ago.
The “choice” touted even by conservative variants of feminism is an illusion. In reality, the girlboss model is incentivized to the exclusion of more traditional choices, such as relying on a husband’s single income, which are punished by our tax code, our antidiscrimination laws, our immigration policy, and our culture’s ethos. Meanwhile, the very real benefits of the traditional family model are treated as taboo subjects; and the traditional family itself is becoming a luxury good. The bemoaned “two-income trap” didn’t emerge ex nihilo, but resulted from decades of thumbs rigging the scales.
Public policy must be reconfigured so that women can choose a traditional life without fighting against the current. To that end:
- No more illegal labor or mass immigration undercutting American workers. This will reset the price of nannies and burrito taxis to their free-market value.
- No more preferences for women in hiring and promotion, and no more risk of damaging lawsuits to employers who choose married male employees, whose salaries support their wives’ choices to stay home.
- No more lawsuit paydays for complaining to HR about subjective jokes in the workplace.
- No more federal loans and subsidies for universities and female-dominated majors and degrees that don’t pay for themselves; if gender studies degrees are economically self-supporting, private banks will loan students the tuition money without need for the taxpayer’s intervention.
- No more federal funding of the female-dominated NGO complex.
None of these policy changes targets women qua women; they merely remove the unjust incentives and penalties that hinder women from pursuing traditional family life. Once we cut the girlboss’s invisible but very real support strings, we will see just how “independent” she actually is.
