Karine Jean-Pierre is not a #GirlBoss
A qualified defense of feminism's oft-maligned strivers
The Karine Jean-Pierre press tour was perfect group chat fodder but I didn’t really have much to say about it until I saw Sarah Jones’ piece in New York Magazine: “Karine Jean-Pierre and the Return of the Girlboss.” In it, Jones characterizes Jean-Pierre, the former White House press secretary, as a #girlboss, which she defines as a woman whose “professional accomplishments outweigh moral considerations.” But that’s not what a Girlboss is!
Jones is not the only one to evoke the image of the Girlboss in relation to Jean-Pierre. In Becca Rothfeld’s beautifully scathing review of Jean-Pierre’s new book Independent, she calls the former press secretary an artifact of “the age of pantsuits, the word ‘empowerment,’ the musical ‘Hamilton,’ the cheap therapeutic entreaties to ‘work on yourself’ and ‘lean in’ to various corporate abysses.”
Jean-Pierre isn’t a Girlboss — in fact, calling her one is an affront to real Girlbosses who at least believed in competence and effort. Rather, she represents a post-Girlboss moment where striving has been replaced by pure performance and where one’s identity is trotted out as a ready-made shield.
Whatever your gripes with Girlboss feminism, to be a Girlboss is to steadfastly believe that hard work, professional excellence, and success could lead to gender equality. Jones’ definition ignores the Girlboss’ naked ambition as well as her pollyannish but sincere belief that collective benefits would come from her success.
Jean-Pierre contains neither the desperate energy of the striving perfectionist nor even the pretense that her ascension should provide concrete benefits to the groups she superficially represents. Rather, she is something utterly different and unreservedly worse: Jean-Pierre is what comes after the death of the Girlboss, after the strivers have been driven underground, after a yearning for excellence has been mocked into oblivion.
The Girlboss theory of power
The Girlboss era feels like a lifetime ago, so to rescue my flagging memory, I went back to read the original texts: #GIRLBOSS by Sophia Amoruso, the founder of clothing retail company Nasty Gal, and Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead by former Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg. I also went back and read many of the critical anti-Girlboss essays of the late 2010s and early 2020s to refresh my memory of this bygone age. Finally, I forced myself to read — okay, skim — Jean-Pierre’s new book, Independent.
Girlboss feminism had two core arguments: First, that women could excel in male-dominated fields by making different choices and developing different skills. Second, that female representation at the top would lead to better outcomes for all women.
In Sandberg’s Lean In, the former Facebook executive clearly lays out her thesis for how individual female success can lead to widespread female empowerment. She recounts a frustrating and difficult moment when, pregnant, she found herself nauseous and waddling across a large parking lot to try and make it to an important presentation without throwing up.
Sandberg admits to her prior obliviousness to the burdens her pregnant employees had faced, realizing that it was only when she became pregnant that she recognized the need for accommodations (like designated parking spaces for pregnant women): “Having one pregnant woman at the top … made the difference.”
Everyone clowns on this thesis now — hire more women guards! — but the evidence that female leadership can have tangible positive impacts for women is pretty robust and theoretically sound:
In Norway, gender quotas on corporate boards led to fewer workforce reductions, higher employment levels, and lower short-term profits.
In Brazil, cities that just barely elected a female mayor were compared to ones that just barely didn’t. Cities with female mayors have better health outcomes on measures like prenatal visits and percentage of premature births. Notably, researchers found that “the effect of policies on health outcomes are concentrated for babies delivered by less educated mothers.”
And in India, they actually did the hire more women guards meme and … it worked! By implementing all-women police stations, female victims of kidnapping and domestic violence were much more likely to report offenses. Researchers found marginal effects on crime deterrence as well.
None of this research is dispositive, but I do think increasing women’s representation in key jobs like policing, medicine, and politics has an average positive effect on issues disproportionately affecting women. The mechanism seems fairly obvious to me: Lots of women have shared experiences of pregnancy or discrimination, and when more of them have power they have a shared self-interest in remedying or combatting that discrimination.
As a result, I would expect that female representation in elite spaces would have the greatest impact on issue areas that really are shared — like women’s health — and the least impact in areas where rich, educated women are unlikely to share the same experience as poorer, less educated women — like wages.
The feminist theory of the Girlboss wasn’t totally without merit, but it did wrongfully assume that representation would remain tethered to competence and solidarity with other women. Jean-Pierre is what happens when those ties come undone.
The post-Girlboss era: Representation untethered from competence
Despite all that can be said about Sandberg and Amoruso, their books and lives are chock-full of evidence that they are extremely hard workers that held themselves to incredibly high standards in their professional lives. Jean-Pierre, on the other hand, was quite obviously bad at her job. Here are a few quotes from her colleagues and reporters who worked with her:
Even just reading Independent I was struck by how oblivious Jean-Pierre was about her own field. She wrote that she “never realized” the effort to push Biden out would succeed and that “I’m not sure how I missed the signs, but I had no clue Biden had a cold and was off his game until he began to speak at the debate.”
Unlike Lean In and #GIRLBOSS, her book Independent is devoid of any grit, perseverance, or personal accountability.1 Time and again, Jean-Pierre references her history-making appointment as “the first Black and openly queer White House press secretary.” But she never goes further. Never adds that the whole point of that representation is to improve outcomes for people. It’s not an end in and of itself. A real Girlboss would know that.
Contrast this with how Amoruso talked about her status as a non-college-educated female founder: “Are we in a new era of feminism where we don’t have to talk about it? I don’t know, but I want to pretend that it is. I’m not going to lie — it’s insulting to be praised for being a woman with no college degree. But then, I’m aware that this is also to my advantage: I can show up to a meeting and blow people away just by being my street-educated self.”
Jean-Pierre’s book tour has been somehow worse than the book itself. In an interview with The New Yorker‘s Isaac Chotiner, he asked the former press secretary why she thinks the Democratic Party turned on Biden. The response is, charitably, word salad:
“Because they believed that he needed to step aside. There’s more to this than just that period of time. This is very layered, right? There’s a period of time that I questioned what was happening and how do we treat our own, how do we treat people who are decent people? And then you also have to think about how I’m thinking about this as a Black woman who is part of the L.G.B.T.Q. community, and living in this time where I also don’t think Democrats right now, Democrats’ leadership, is protecting vulnerable people in the way that it should.”
At another point in the interview, Chotiner asks her to reconcile her claim that she didn’t believe then-Vice President Kamala Harris could win with her anger that others were pushing for another candidate to replace Biden. She is incapable of doing so and again returns to the claim that it was disrespectful to Harris to even consider it.
This is not a Girlboss. A Girlboss does not waive away competency, efficacy, and capacity behind the shield of her womanhood. She strives, sometimes embarrassingly hard, to prove she deserves her job.
A qualified defense of strivers
That women should seek power and work hard to achieve it is unobjectionable. It’s also insufficient. One of the core problems with Girlboss feminism is it was contentless. Yes, it pushed women to achieve professional success and presumed some knock-on benefits would occur to other women, but that’s a pitiful goal.
While striving for its own sake has some merit, if women are to be engaged in more than a Sisyphean struggle, that striving should have purpose. Striving to improve an addictive social media app that makes teenage girls suicidal is not a worthwhile goal, Sheryl!
Jones argued that “the girlboss was cringe,” a classic charge made against anyone who openly yearns for success or exhibits too much eagerness to achieve their goals. I have well-documented gripes with “cringe” as a concept, but I’ll table those for now. Rather, I want to talk about what happens when we mock strivers.
First, we get elites like Jean-Pierre who no longer have to even pretend to care about doing a good job. Second, we undermine the importance of individual agency in achieving personal goals. And third, we have to suffer through the absurdity of the soft-girl, tradwife epidemic we’re living through right now.
Social media is full of popular videos of mothers strolling effortlessly through life with designer clothes, perfect jobs, and Pilates-toned bodies. It’s obvious that creating these videos on top of full-time jobs and child care is a lot of work. But the performance is entirely devoid of the cringe, striver energy of the Girlboss.
Perhaps the most absurd version of this is the Juilliard-trained, multimillionaire businesswoman Hannah Neeleman who posts beautiful videos of her life running a farm with her husband and eight children. Neeleman is obviously working incredibly hard both on- and off-screen, but her online presence feels breezy and effortless.
I said that the work behind these videos is obvious, but the problem is that it’s not obvious to some. Whereas Amoruso and Sandberg give at times exhaustive step-by-step guides of how to make it in their respective fields, the current successful female archetype is silent about how to achieve success.2 Inundated by these images of the idyllic, easy lifestyle, young girls and women are internalizing the message that the good life is something that happens to you. Preferably when a man comes to sweep you off your feet.
The Girlboss wasn’t peak feminism, but she was pushing us toward a better synthesis. I’m not surprised so many people miss her now that she is gone.
She does complain a lot about how hard her job is. Which, you know, sure.
Lots of the advice was very good! Amoruso dispenses boring career advice about resumes, not chewing gum, and sending thank you notes after interviews. Sandberg’s warning that women hold themselves back “in ways both big and small, by lacking self-confidence, by not raising our hands, and by pulling back when we should be leaning in,” is just self-evidently true for a lot of women.
What happens when we mock strivers:
"First, we get elites like Jean-Pierre who no longer have to even pretend to care about doing a good job. Second, we undermine the importance of individual agency in achieving personal goals. And third, we have to suffer through the absurdity of the soft-girl, tradwife epidemic we’re living through right now."
Oooof.
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There's a real ugliness to the Biden admin hiring and keeping Karine Jean-Pierre. It seems that they wanted to diversify their staff as a performative measure, but didn't believe finding a competent Black woman was possible so they just hired an incompetent one to placate the left.