Enough with the #Girlboss already!
What is it with women calling themselves girl bosses and mumpreneurs? Eugh. I don’t get it, I love supporting women but this just makes me feel all kinds of uncomfortable. I wrote briefly about it a few years ago and it’s still making me twitchy so here we go again!
I mean ladies please, why can’t we just be bosses? the director, a CEO, an entrepreneur?.. I’ve never been into labels and I find it really difficult to understand why women who fight so hard everyday to be appreciated as equals are slapping these titles all over themselves as a way of feeling strong and empowered. Empowerment to me is rocking up to a business meeting in a pair of sparkly trainers with a ‘don’t care attitude, ready to take over the world!
The thing is men have been doing this to women for years – pigeon holing and categorising us into boxes and I strongly believe that by labelling ourselves this way we are doing some of the work for them. How do we ever expect to be respected and treated as equals if we continue to wear mum boss titles over our heads? Surely this isn’t the way to break free from the gender stereotypes? Can you imagine if it was the other way around – boyboss? or dadpreneur? shudder shudder, it doesn’t sound right does it? so why is it ok for us to do it?
I’ve been my own boss forever and I’ve never felt the need to brand myself this way. In fact quite the opposite. I want to be respected for being a legit business owner in my own right, the fact that I am female and have kids has nothing to do with it. Yes we are amazing at multi tasking and running a family but why are we using these things as credentials?.. I know I’m an absolute kickass I don’t need a trendy hashtag to verify it for me.
Could it be that it feels powerful and strong belonging to a group of women doing the same thing?… Or is it because we’ve never been truly accepted as equals in the workplace so we decided to break free and start a movement?… I don’t know but I do believe that we want the world to recognise we can do it all too by shouting it loudly from the rooftops and that’s ok, that’s a brilliant thing, we are proud, we are strong, we are capable individuals, so how about we ditch the outdated labels and show what we can do through our actions instead.
I always try to be fair and to appreciate things from a different perspective to mine and I don’t want to disrespect anyone who feels passionately about what they do, so I’m genuinely curious to know why women use these words to describe themselves and their work.
Share your comments below and let’s open up some (friendly) discussion… maybe we can learn some interesting stuff from each other as we go.
Big love for now
Allison x
