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How the myth of the ‘girlboss’ harms emerging women in tech

On Lafayette Street in SoHo, young, fashionable women lined up around the block to enter a minimalist, millennial oasis, the most perfect Instagram feed…

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On Lafayette Street in SoHo, young, fashionable women lined up around the block to enter a minimalist, millennial oasis, the most perfect Instagram feed brought to life. Staff members glided around the store in pastel pink suits, each embodying the kind of girl that Glossier made us all want to be: beautiful, yet effortless.

“We want to inspire, but we also want to be realistic and show beauty in real life,” Glossier founder and CEO Emily Weiss said in a 2017 interview with Inc, just as the brand had reached what Weiss herself described as “cult status.” Even Chrissy Teigen and Reese Witherspoon wore Glossier’s signature Cloud Paint blush to the Oscars

We understood the irony of the message as we sampled their sheer, almost-not-there lipgloss, then looked into a mirror decorated with white vinyl letters in the bustling pop-up shop: you look good, our reflection told us. Glossier affirmed our inherent beauty, then reminded us that we can be even more beautiful if we buy their “Boy Brow” pomade, which sold one tube every 32 seconds by 2018.

Glossier’s commoditized feminism aside, it’s no easy task to launch a $1.8 billion company in the brutally competitive beauty industry, especially one with such broad appeal. After all, Glossier’s founder and CEO Emily Weiss is very, very far from the first entrepreneur to profit off of our desire to look good. And who cares? That Cloud Paint is pretty magical, if we’re being honest. Like with many consumer brands geared toward women, we buy in not just because of the marketing, but because of the product itself.

Glossier founder Emily Weiss speaks at TechCrunch Disrupt in 2018 Image Credits: TechCrunch

But as Weiss steps down from her current role and prepares for maternity leave, her success and subsequently typical choice to become her company’s board chairperson has been co-opted as the end of the “girlboss” era.

What even is a ”girlboss” anymore? Once a vaguely aspirational term of praise reserved only for affluent white women, the moniker now reflects the maddening contradiction of workplace feminism: we know that it’s not enough to just be a woman in power, and that what we do with that power matters far more than simply wielding it. Yet women founders and CEOs remain frustratingly rare as Silicon Valley’s glass ceiling persists, almost impenetrable – venture capitalists (only 13% of whom are women in the U.S.) allocate 98% of their funding to startups helmed by men. It’s no wonder, then, how we’ve ended up with the paradox of the “girlboss.” 

The making (and unraveling) of the ‘girlboss’ myth

Nasty Gal CEO Sophia Amoruso is credited with coining the term in the title of her 2014 memoir, “#Girlboss,” which chronicled her rags-to-riches success and was adapted into a Netflix show. The following year, she stepped down as CEO, and by 2016, her company filed for bankruptcy and was purchased by Boohoo. Then, Amoruso started a company called Girlboss that was likened to “Linkedin for Women.” She stepped down from that company in 2020.

“Girlboss” originally gained popularity beyond Amoruso’s book as a form of praise, according to Kirsten Green, co-founder and investor at Forerunner Ventures. Green has spent her career bankrolling the companies that define what’s cool, including Glossier, Outdoor Voices and Away, whose founders are often cited as the archetypal examples of “girlbosses.”

“I truly believe the ‘girlboss’ term was created to celebrate an emerging wave of female leaders – which is still rare in business, and was even rarer around 10 years ago when the phrase was popularized,” Green told TechCrunch in an email. 

The term itself, though, hasn’t aged nearly as well as Green’s portfolio. Years later, even Amoruso herself has expressed discomfort with the phrase.

“It’s not a compliment. It’s more of a mockery,” said Isa Watson, founder and CEO of social media app Squad. Watson, who holds an MBA from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has raised $4.5 million for her app, placing Squad in the mere 0.34% of companies funded last year with a Black woman founder.

The idea of the “girlboss” today is shrouded in privilege. Since its debut, the term has come to represent a small cohort of white, affluent millennial women who rise up into positions of power, preach the gospel of feminism, then ultimately fumble the millenial pink ball and fall from grace when it turns out that their politics just aren’t that transformative.

“[The term “girlboss”] feels disconnected from reality, which is that there are very few women that have had this label applied to them,” said Sruti Bharat, who most recently worked as interim CEO at All Raise, a venture fund supporting women and non-binary founders. “They all seem to have slightly similar journeys, like they run consumer brands, maybe [have] slightly problematic racial politics, and some kind of takedown piece [is written about them]. That’s like the PR trope.”

Unlike the glowy skin depicted on Glossier’s Instagram, the reputation of its founder and CEO Emily Weiss is not without blemishes. Glossier’s management has faced well-deserved scrutiny for failing to support members of its retail staff, leaving them to endure racist treatment from customers. (Following the complaints, Weiss issued a public apology, and Glossier donated $1 million – half to organizations fighting racial injustice, and half to Black-owned beauty businesses). 

Then, when the pandemic hit, Glossier laid off all of its retail employees and shut down its physical stores. But just a year later, the beauty brand raised an $80 million Series E round at a $1.8 billion valuation to open up permanent retail stores in Seattle, Los Angeles and London, capitalizing on the dewy fairytale of its Manhattan flagship store.

Mandela SH Dixon, All Raise's recently appointed CEO

Mandela SH Dixon, All Raise’s current CEO Image Credits: All Raise

Early this year, the company slashed staff yet again. Glossier laid off one-third of its corporate employees, mostly on its tech team, as Weiss admitted to staff that the company got “distracted” from its core beauty business and got ahead of itself with hiring. Weiss’ recent departure from the CEO role, along with that of her CMO from the company altogether, only amplified the scrutiny – fairly or not.

Although a select few white women have been able to rise through the ranks of startup success, tech leadership is far from reflecting the populations its products serve. Even All Raise, which was founded with the explicit mission of supporting diverse founders, just recently appointed a Black woman, Mandela Schumacher-Hodge Dixon, as its long-term CEO. Dixon is setting out to broaden the nonprofit’s definition of inclusion after it was helmed by its white, female founder Pam Kostka for three years.  

‘They’re not collecting stats on that’

“The end of the girlboss era? What does that even mean?” asked Rosie Nguyen in a conversation with TechCrunch. Nguyen is founder and CMO of Fanhouse, a creator platform that just raised $25 million from Andreessen Horowitz. 

Despite the prevalence of the “girlboss” in pop culture, the reality on the ground for women entrepreneurs has played out much differently. Less than 2% of venture capital funding went to all-female founding teams in 2021, marking a five-year low. 

There’s a disconnect between the evolution of feminism in the outside world, juxtaposed with the frustratingly slow rate at which Silicon Valley realizes that a woman CEO shouldn’t be a novelty. Outside of work, women fight for an intersectional feminism that’s trans-inclusive, uplifts people of color and advocates for disability rights. But in startup culture, just being a woman in and of itself is seen as subversive.

“As a female founder, it kind of stops there, because that’s impressive enough to people, but I’m like, well actually, I’m also a Vietnamese immigrant,” said Nguyen. “I was born in Vietnam. I’m Southeast Asian. Like, do you know any Vietnamese immigrant female founders in a Series A startup? I don’t know, maybe I’m the only one, but they’re not collecting stats on that… Or, alright, I’m queer, I’m bisexual, but right now, everything is so white and male that anything else is already impressive to people.”  

The confusion around what “girlboss” actually means stems from its application to a broad range of poor management decisions, from the ignorance Weiss displayed about racism in Glossier stores (unfortunately, this is rather common amongst white CEOs) to the dangerous, life-threatening fraud perpetrated by Theranos’ Elizabeth Holmes. 

The “girlboss” stereotype poisons the image of the woman CEO as more and more companies run by white men earn the overwhelming majority venture funding. And of course, those startups are by no means innocent when it comes to bad management.

“If you look at someone like Adam Neumann and WeWork for example, he was covered [in the media] in a very flattering light until the very moment when it all came tumbling down,” said Watson. “I mean, there’s a number of things that went wrong throughout the course of his tenure that were never brought up. And so when you have female founders that have simple management missteps, I just feel like they’re brutalized by the media, and the culture is anxiety-inducing.”

As it is, very few women founders even have the chance to ascend to the top of their field, and those who do are largely white women who come from privileged backgrounds. The female entrepreneurs who succeed by traditional measures are vilified as “girlbosses,” while women of color seem to be left out of the discourse entirely. That’s part of why Bharat, a woman of color with South Asian heritage, says she has never identified with the term.

If Weiss, the founder who built a makeup brand that’s been hailed as the next generation’s Estee Lauder, who pioneered the blueprint for several DTC brands that came after hers, is portrayed as a failure for taking maternity leave and switching executive roles at the company she created simply because she’s a woman, that doesn’t bode well for underrepresented founders without Weiss’s advantages. 

“I think it’s like second- or third-wave feminism, like ‘lean in,” Nguyen said, referencing the catch phrase of controversial, longtime Meta COO Sheryl Sandberg, who just stepped down. “It’s the whole concept of feminism as like, why aren’t more billionaires women? It became laughable to people because the point is not having more female billionaires, the point is having less income inequality.”

The pitfalls of corporatized feminism

While the women who have been branded as archetypal “girlbosses” have largely failed to deliver on the promise of empowering women through selling makeup (or suitcases, or athletic gear), it’s worth examining why they’re even expected to do so in the first place.

“Just because a woman has been oppressed, or has been marginalized, or treated differently, doesn’t mean that she is also aware of how to fix it, or how to speak about it or is not perpetuating it herself. We’re always advocating for women to be icons … but the reality of that is it takes actual advocacy work and movement building and policy,” Bharat said.

The bar is higher for women entrepreneurs not only in terms of financial results they’re expected to deliver (cough cough, Elon Musk), or the thin margin of error they’re afforded, but also in terms of what their job description implicitly includes. The industry doesn’t look to white male founders to serve as perfect advocates for social justice issues. Indeed, the reality of our economic system is that it’s not their job, and whether we like it or not, corporate feminism isn’t going to save us from difficult ethical dilemmas either.

“I really feel for some of these leaders who are trying to learn as they are very much in the public eye,” Bharat said. “There’s very little room for error for women, and I’m not saying there weren’t mistakes. There definitely have been, but the room to recover is completely limited.”

The “Girlboss” label harms all women because it’s a reductive stereotype that detracts from the conversation around real issues in corporate culture and society. It’s a distraction that uses emerging women founders as a scapegoat for systemic issues instead of opening up a productive discussion on how we can reform workplaces to function better for all people, particularly members of marginalized communities.

By conflating all management mistakes as equal, we lose sight of each individual issue we’re trying to remedy – and by calling Weiss a “girlboss,” we risk discouraging women in leadership roles from taking risks, learning and growing. We also perpetuate the erasure of women of color in tech.

This isn’t the end of the woman founder and CEO. Instead, let’s make it the end of unrealistic expectations for women who run companies, and the hollow, corporatized feminism that comes as a result.

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Homes listed for sale in early June sell for $7,700 more

New Zillow research suggests the spring home shopping season may see a second wave this summer if mortgage rates fall
The post Homes listed for sale in…

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  • A Zillow analysis of 2023 home sales finds homes listed in the first two weeks of June sold for 2.3% more. 
  • The best time to list a home for sale is a month later than it was in 2019, likely driven by mortgage rates.
  • The best time to list can be as early as the second half of February in San Francisco, and as late as the first half of July in New York and Philadelphia. 

Spring home sellers looking to maximize their sale price may want to wait it out and list their home for sale in the first half of June. A new Zillow® analysis of 2023 sales found that homes listed in the first two weeks of June sold for 2.3% more, a $7,700 boost on a typical U.S. home.  

The best time to list consistently had been early May in the years leading up to the pandemic. The shift to June suggests mortgage rates are strongly influencing demand on top of the usual seasonality that brings buyers to the market in the spring. This home-shopping season is poised to follow a similar pattern as that in 2023, with the potential for a second wave if the Federal Reserve lowers interest rates midyear or later. 

The 2.3% sale price premium registered last June followed the first spring in more than 15 years with mortgage rates over 6% on a 30-year fixed-rate loan. The high rates put home buyers on the back foot, and as rates continued upward through May, they were still reassessing and less likely to bid boldly. In June, however, rates pulled back a little from 6.79% to 6.67%, which likely presented an opportunity for determined buyers heading into summer. More buyers understood their market position and could afford to transact, boosting competition and sale prices.

The old logic was that sellers could earn a premium by listing in late spring, when search activity hit its peak. Now, with persistently low inventory, mortgage rate fluctuations make their own seasonality. First-time home buyers who are on the edge of qualifying for a home loan may dip in and out of the market, depending on what’s happening with rates. It is almost certain the Federal Reserve will push back any interest-rate cuts to mid-2024 at the earliest. If mortgage rates follow, that could bring another surge of buyers later this year.

Mortgage rates have been impacting affordability and sale prices since they began rising rapidly two years ago. In 2022, sellers nationwide saw the highest sale premium when they listed their home in late March, right before rates barreled past 5% and continued climbing. 

Zillow’s research finds the best time to list can vary widely by metropolitan area. In 2023, it was as early as the second half of February in San Francisco, and as late as the first half of July in New York. Thirty of the top 35 largest metro areas saw for-sale listings command the highest sale prices between May and early July last year. 

Zillow also found a wide range in the sale price premiums associated with homes listed during those peak periods. At the hottest time of the year in San Jose, homes sold for 5.5% more, a $88,000 boost on a typical home. Meanwhile, homes in San Antonio sold for 1.9% more during that same time period.  

 

Metropolitan Area Best Time to List Price Premium Dollar Boost
United States First half of June 2.3% $7,700
New York, NY First half of July 2.4% $15,500
Los Angeles, CA First half of May 4.1% $39,300
Chicago, IL First half of June 2.8% $8,800
Dallas, TX First half of June 2.5% $9,200
Houston, TX Second half of April 2.0% $6,200
Washington, DC Second half of June 2.2% $12,700
Philadelphia, PA First half of July 2.4% $8,200
Miami, FL First half of June 2.3% $12,900
Atlanta, GA Second half of June 2.3% $8,700
Boston, MA Second half of May 3.5% $23,600
Phoenix, AZ First half of June 3.2% $14,700
San Francisco, CA Second half of February 4.2% $50,300
Riverside, CA First half of May 2.7% $15,600
Detroit, MI First half of July 3.3% $7,900
Seattle, WA First half of June 4.3% $31,500
Minneapolis, MN Second half of May 3.7% $13,400
San Diego, CA Second half of April 3.1% $29,600
Tampa, FL Second half of June 2.1% $8,000
Denver, CO Second half of May 2.9% $16,900
Baltimore, MD First half of July 2.2% $8,200
St. Louis, MO First half of June 2.9% $7,000
Orlando, FL First half of June 2.2% $8,700
Charlotte, NC Second half of May 3.0% $11,000
San Antonio, TX First half of June 1.9% $5,400
Portland, OR Second half of April 2.6% $14,300
Sacramento, CA First half of June 3.2% $17,900
Pittsburgh, PA Second half of June 2.3% $4,700
Cincinnati, OH Second half of April 2.7% $7,500
Austin, TX Second half of May 2.8% $12,600
Las Vegas, NV First half of June 3.4% $14,600
Kansas City, MO Second half of May 2.5% $7,300
Columbus, OH Second half of June 3.3% $10,400
Indianapolis, IN First half of July 3.0% $8,100
Cleveland, OH First half of July  3.4% $7,400
San Jose, CA First half of June 5.5% $88,400

 

The post Homes listed for sale in early June sell for $7,700 more appeared first on Zillow Research.

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Survey Shows Declining Concerns Among Americans About COVID-19

Survey Shows Declining Concerns Among Americans About COVID-19

A new survey reveals that only 20% of Americans view covid-19 as "a major threat"…

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Survey Shows Declining Concerns Among Americans About COVID-19

A new survey reveals that only 20% of Americans view covid-19 as "a major threat" to the health of the US population - a sharp decline from a high of 67% in July 2020.

(SARMDY/Shutterstock)

What's more, the Pew Research Center survey conducted from Feb. 7 to Feb. 11 showed that just 10% of Americans are concerned that they will  catch the disease and require hospitalization.

"This data represents a low ebb of public concern about the virus that reached its height in the summer and fall of 2020, when as many as two-thirds of Americans viewed COVID-19 as a major threat to public health," reads the report, which was published March 7.

According to the survey, half of the participants understand the significance of researchers and healthcare providers in understanding and treating long COVID - however 27% of participants consider this issue less important, while 22% of Americans are unaware of long COVID.

What's more, while Democrats were far more worried than Republicans in the past, that gap has narrowed significantly.

"In the pandemic’s first year, Democrats were routinely about 40 points more likely than Republicans to view the coronavirus as a major threat to the health of the U.S. population. This gap has waned as overall levels of concern have fallen," reads the report.

More via the Epoch Times;

The survey found that three in ten Democrats under 50 have received an updated COVID-19 vaccine, compared with 66 percent of Democrats ages 65 and older.

Moreover, 66 percent of Democrats ages 65 and older have received the updated COVID-19 vaccine, while only 24 percent of Republicans ages 65 and older have done so.

“This 42-point partisan gap is much wider now than at other points since the start of the outbreak. For instance, in August 2021, 93 percent of older Democrats and 78 percent of older Republicans said they had received all the shots needed to be fully vaccinated (a 15-point gap),” it noted.

COVID-19 No Longer an Emergency

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recently issued its updated recommendations for the virus, which no longer require people to stay home for five days after testing positive for COVID-19.

The updated guidance recommends that people who contracted a respiratory virus stay home, and they can resume normal activities when their symptoms improve overall and their fever subsides for 24 hours without medication.

“We still must use the commonsense solutions we know work to protect ourselves and others from serious illness from respiratory viruses, this includes vaccination, treatment, and staying home when we get sick,” CDC director Dr. Mandy Cohen said in a statement.

The CDC said that while the virus remains a threat, it is now less likely to cause severe illness because of widespread immunity and improved tools to prevent and treat the disease.

Importantly, states and countries that have already adjusted recommended isolation times have not seen increased hospitalizations or deaths related to COVID-19,” it stated.

The federal government suspended its free at-home COVID-19 test program on March 8, according to a website set up by the government, following a decrease in COVID-19-related hospitalizations.

According to the CDC, hospitalization rates for COVID-19 and influenza diseases remain “elevated” but are decreasing in some parts of the United States.

Tyler Durden Sun, 03/10/2024 - 22:45

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Rand Paul Teases Senate GOP Leader Run – Musk Says “I Would Support”

Rand Paul Teases Senate GOP Leader Run – Musk Says "I Would Support"

Republican Kentucky Senator Rand Paul on Friday hinted that he may jump…

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Rand Paul Teases Senate GOP Leader Run - Musk Says "I Would Support"

Republican Kentucky Senator Rand Paul on Friday hinted that he may jump into the race to become the next Senate GOP leader, and Elon Musk was quick to support the idea. Republicans must find a successor for periodically malfunctioning Mitch McConnell, who recently announced he'll step down in November, though intending to keep his Senate seat until his term ends in January 2027, when he'd be within weeks of turning 86. 

So far, the announced field consists of two quintessential establishment types: John Cornyn of Texas and John Thune of South Dakota. While John Barrasso's name had been thrown around as one of "The Three Johns" considered top contenders, the Wyoming senator on Tuesday said he'll instead seek the number two slot as party whip. 

Paul used X to tease his potential bid for the position which -- if the GOP takes back the upper chamber in November -- could graduate from Minority Leader to Majority Leader. He started by telling his 5.1 million followers he'd had lots of people asking him about his interest in running...

...then followed up with a poll in which he predictably annihilated Cornyn and Thune, taking a 96% share as of Friday night, with the other two below 2% each. 

Elon Musk was quick to back the idea of Paul as GOP leader, while daring Cornyn and Thune to follow Paul's lead by throwing their names out for consideration by the Twitter-verse X-verse. 

Paul has been a stalwart opponent of security-state mass surveillance, foreign interventionism -- to include shoveling billions of dollars into the proxy war in Ukraine -- and out-of-control spending in general. He demonstrated the latter passion on the Senate floor this week as he ridiculed the latest kick-the-can spending package:   

In February, Paul used Senate rules to force his colleagues into a grueling Super Bowl weekend of votes, as he worked to derail a $95 billion foreign aid bill. "I think we should stay here as long as it takes,” said Paul. “If it takes a week or a month, I’ll force them to stay here to discuss why they think the border of Ukraine is more important than the US border.”

Don't expect a Majority Leader Paul to ditch the filibuster -- he's been a hardy user of the legislative delay tactic. In 2013, he spoke for 13 hours to fight the nomination of John Brennan as CIA director. In 2015, he orated for 10-and-a-half-hours to oppose extension of the Patriot Act

Rand Paul amid his 10 1/2 hour filibuster in 2015

Among the general public, Paul is probably best known as Capitol Hill's chief tormentor of Dr. Anthony Fauci, who was director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease during the Covid-19 pandemic. Paul says the evidence indicates the virus emerged from China's Wuhan Institute of Virology. He's accused Fauci and other members of the US government public health apparatus of evading questions about their funding of the Chinese lab's "gain of function" research, which takes natural viruses and morphs them into something more dangerous. Paul has pointedly said that Fauci committed perjury in congressional hearings and that he belongs in jail "without question."   

Musk is neither the only nor the first noteworthy figure to back Paul for party leader. Just hours after McConnell announced his upcoming step-down from leadership, independent 2024 presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy, Jr voiced his support: 

In a testament to the extent to which the establishment recoils at the libertarian-minded Paul, mainstream media outlets -- which have been quick to report on other developments in the majority leader race -- pretended not to notice that Paul had signaled his interest in the job. More than 24 hours after Paul's test-the-waters tweet-fest began, not a single major outlet had brought it to the attention of their audience. 

That may be his strongest endorsement yet. 

Tyler Durden Sun, 03/10/2024 - 20:25

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