Can you smell the testosterone?
Elon Musk, emboldened by Trump to be more “aggressive,” is shouting “chainsaw!”
as he makesbrutal cuts to the federal bureaucracy.
Not in the least surprised by all this chest-thumping: women in business.
On the other, some see it as galvanizing.
“Now we know who these people are,” she adds.
“The masks and the gloves are off.”
Jennifer Berdahl, a professor of sociology at the University of British Columbia, uses a similar analogy.
“It’s like boys in a sandbox but scaling it to billionaires.
The gladiator games don’t just play out among the top alphas those down the chain watch and learn.
In a January article titled “Is corporate America going MAGA?”
an (ironically) anonymous banker told the Financial Times, “I feel liberated.
We can say ‘retard’ and ‘pussy’ without the fear of getting canceled.
Almost half of them said they feel men face discrimination in the US.
And, tired of waiting on corporate America, they’re increasingly building their own arenas.
Over the past decade, women have made significant, if uneven, gains in the corporate workforce.
The overwhelming majority of this small group is white.
Firms owned by men grew by just 7% in the same time period.
In Silicon Valley, however, Zuckerberg’s “masculine energy” quip doesn’t track with reality.
As of 2022, women made up just 22% oftech workers.
That’s the same proportion of jobs they held in 2005, the year after Facebook was founded.
The promises of the girlboss era, meanwhile, have come up short.
In the 2010s,Sheryl Sandbergcalled on ambitious women to “lean in.”
Work hard enough, assert yourself, and you’ve got the option to have it all.
They were feminine and white, often thin and privileged.
This needs to change.”
Those can include solutions for women’s health and caregiving.
“you oughta find people that possess the traits that work well in your culture.”
DEI, she says, shouldn’t be thought of as a blanket fix.
Equity looks different in the work of a university than in an architecture firm.
There’s no business case for stifling diversity.
Personalities that are power-obsessed often swing politically to hold onto their prestige.
With that reality exposed, some women are changing their responses.
“There’s a full-frontal assault on women and people of color,” Jupe says.
“The time to play nice is not now.
You cannot have kid gloves on when you’re fighting against really silly bullies.”
The era of the girlboss is long dead.
No singular trope or central figure has taken its place in 2025 which may be a good thing.
“Nobody should be made into a hero,” Lucas says.
“My hope for women is that we start building power collectively.”
Amanda Hooveris a senior correspondent at Business Insider covering the tech industry.
She writes about the biggest tech companies and trends.
