THE MYTH OF MAKING IT

The former executive editor of Teen Vogue and Feministing considers the nature of ambition and how corporate feminism sets women up to fail.

By the mid-2010s, it seemed that America had entered the “girlboss era,” when ambitious women could finally have it all: wealth, power, relationship fulfillment, and “feminine chic.” Mukhopadhyay, however, argues that “the quest for structural equality and justice asked women to fetishize gender inequality as something you could overcome with quirky personality traits, disarm­ing oppressive men with a twinkle of the eye and a touch on the arm.” As she shows, that brand of feminism did nothing to change the basic structural inequality and injustice in the workplace or the misogyny that undergirds society. When, for example, startup founder Elizabeth Holmes was convicted of criminal wrongdoing, “some felt—despite her company’s egregious lies—that Holmes’s treatment by the industry and the press highlighted an unfair double standard for women founders.” Drawing on both research and her own experiences, Mukhopadhyay shows how the workaholic “hustling” that also goes along with “girlbossing” has helped fuel workplace toxicity, which has led to high rates of burnout and, more recently, “quiet quitting,” an ethic that rejects the professional win-at-all-costs mentality for a “politics of laziness.” What the author argues for instead is that women “channel our ‘hustle’ energy” into organizing the workplace in terms that take into account not only gender, but other factors like race and sexuality. She also asks women to reconsider the “false bill of goods” that capitalism has sold them about what makes for a prosperous life and consider embracing the ethos of “having enough.” Provocative and intelligent, Mukhopadhyay’s book will appeal to both feminist scholars and working women seeking more humane ways to navigate the sexist, racist, hypercapitalist minefield of the modern workplace.

An incisive study of the current business landscape.