This week, a new book about Meta by former executive Sarah Wynn-Williams is making headlines for its explosive claims about the abhorrent behavior of the company’s leadership, and how their culture largely disregarded the vast harms they caused—from failing to protect adolescent girls from content promoting eating disorders to failing to prevent the dissemination of content that fomented genocide.
Holding the powerful and badly behaved to account is laudable work, whether the powerful are men or women. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg remains one of the most powerful men in tech—and he’s not only cozied up to President Donald Trump, he’s also lamented the feminization of his industry. Zuckerberg and his tech bro peers are going full MAGA, increasingly embracing a kind of unapologetic sexism that one would more likely expect to see at a cage fight than in a northern California boardroom. (Who showed up to a UFC event even as UFC owner Dana White welcomed accused rapist and sex trafficker Andrew Tate—who denies all such charges—back to America, and back into the MAGA fold? Mark Zuckerberg.)
So why is so much of the reporting on the book, which takes a look at Meta leadership more broadly, so focused on former COO Sheryl Sandberg?
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The answer: It’s the Girlboss, whom critics across the political spectrum love to hate. Even now, powerful women trigger all sorts of resentment and anger, even among some self-identified feminists. In the hypermasculine Trump era, though, we should pause and ask whether it was such a great idea to kill the girlboss off.
She died an inglorious death, beaten down by exposés as endless as they were thin. No one sent flowers. No one mourned the girlboss. Female founders were lumped together under this diminutive, whether they had ever used the term or not (and virtually none did). They were collectively saddled with the obligation to be flawless feminists and peerless leaders, even when they weren’t trying to be activists but were just trying to sell, say, suitcases.
Their alleged wrongdoings were often vague—creating a “toxic” workplace, for example—and certainly never the sort of thing that would have impacted a man’s performance review. Often, it felt suspiciously like some employees just didn’t like their bosses, which is less an indictment of female leadership and more simply a condition of being a human being in the world.
When a leader, or the boss, is female, though, employee expectations are often different. We expect women to be kinder and gentler, but then don’t respect them if they’re too nice. If they assert their authority, they’re b---hes.
That’s a big enough challenge for women to surmount. But in the period of burning girlbosses at the stake, employees disliking a female boss wasn’t just a workplace problem; it became a story. Even somewhat obscure female founders and CEOs, women who were definitely not household names, were swiftly pulled apart in glossy magazine stories. The broader message was that female ambition itself was a little suspect, a lot cringe, and potentially dangerous: Get too big and you should expect to be taken down a peg.
This is not to say that every woman felled by the girlboss backlash was an innocent victim—some of the women taken down by the backlash did legitimately awful things. It is certainly not to say that Sheryl Sandberg was a flawless or even good leader; she was, in fact, helping to lead a company that seems to have been doing all manner of horrible things, and then going to great lengths to obscure its responsibility. And it is definitely not to say that the ultimate goal of feminism should be to allow women to behave as badly as men.
It is to say, though, that holding women to radically different standards, placing on their shoulders the obligation of solving not just corporate inequality but gender inequality writ large and then feeling gleeful about tearing them down when they inevitably fall short is sexist, and bad—bad for women, bad for business, and as it turns out, pretty bad for the country.
This great girlboss teardown happened well before Trump ran for reelection. But it was very much a reaction to the first woman he beat. And it helped to usher in an antifeminist backlash that has gotten so vulgar and hideously misogynist that arguments over Lean In seem practically quaint.
It turns out that when you push women out, the system doesn’t collapse; it just becomes more male, and worse for women. We’re seeing that now, as the second Trump administration has granted social permission for many men—and man children—to begin unleashing their pent-up misogyny.
Culture is a complex and amorphous thing, and the takedown of the girlboss helped reinforce the kind of simmering-below-the-surface sexism that boils over whenever women get a little too powerful or a little too confident. It helped to reinforce and socially condone hostility to ambitious, power-seeking women—and it’s hard to argue that hostility to ambitious, power-seeking women played no role in Kamala Harris’ defeat, and in the delighted misogyny of the men who brought Trump back to power.
The girlboss was never going to solve gender inequality. She was never going to save womankind from all that ails us. But she didn’t promise to do any of that! A woman at the table doesn’t fix sexism, not for that woman, and definitely not for all women. But it’s visibly worse when the women are mocked or nitpicked out, and the table is all men—and there’s no longer even an inkling that maybe women should have a seat too.
