THE GIRLBOSS IS DEAD. LONG LIVE THE GROUP CHAT.
Something interesting is happening to the girlboss.
For the better part of a decade, the dominant energy in women’s business culture was very every woman for herself. You remember it - it was all mugs, memes and neon signs:
Hustle harder.
Sleep when you’re dead.
Act like a lady. Think like a man. Work like a boss.
Success was framed as a personal conquest - you grabbed it with both hands while everyone else scrambled to keep up.
Bitch Dog eat bitch dog.
And for a while that energy was necessary. Women were breaking through glass ceilings and carving out space in rooms that had been closed to them for a very long time.
But lately I’ve been noticing something shift.
At the Quest Orange International Women’s Day panel I spoke on last week, the conversation kept circling back to the same idea: generosity.
Not competition.
Not comparison.
Not a scoreboard of who’s winning or earning the most.
Generosity. Community. Collaboration. Advocacy.
And then over the weekend while organising the prize pool for the Ronald McDonald House 100 Club fundraiser, I saw that same shift play out in real life.
Business owners offering prizes without hesitation and giving generously simply because the cause mattered.
Messages saying “How can we help?” rather than “What do we get?”
No jockeying.
No positioning.
Just generosity.
Which made me realise that whilst the girlboss era was built on individual success- the next era is being built on collective momentum.
Women sharing audiences and promoting each other’s work, showing up in the room for one another and passing opportunities along, instead of guarding them.
Less “every woman for herself.”
More the rising tide floats all boats.
Because the girlboss era told us success was scarce - that there were only so many seats at the table.
So we sharpened our knives.
But now?
We're pulling up extra chairs and saving someone a seat.
And the irony is that despite what we've been told - the table hasn’t gotten smaller.
It’s actually gotten bigger. And everybody gets their flowers.
This piece first appeared in Excessive Consumption - a weekly dispatch on culture, branding, politics and whatever other modern internet brain rot the algorithm has emotionally assigned me that week.
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