OM DENNE EPISODE
Somebody handed me a notebook in a conference swag bag in 2014. Rose gold foil. GIRL BOSS on the cover.
I was thrilled. I was in my early thirties with four year old twins and a brand new baby, building a business from the ground up, and after years of apologizing for being ambitious I was watching a whole generation of women get handed permission to want things out loud. Charge money. Take up room. Want more. Call yourself the boss.
What none of us could see yet was that the thing being handed to us was the approach we already had, in pink script font. It was the same hustle with better branding, the same expectation of sacrificing time with your family, and the same promise that if you wanted it badly enough for long enough you might eventually get to be one of the ones who made it.
Girl boss culture changed the vocabulary. It did not change the mental load, or the childcare, or who you call when a kid spikes a fever at 10 a.m., or who gets paid and who does it for free.
I call it patriarchy in pink, and this is the episode where I stop being polite about it. I also learned this model before I unlearned it, which is why this is not an audit of you. It is an audit of the structure that has been keeping many of us trapped in businesses that were never designed to fully support us.
What You’ll Learn in This Episode
→ The reason the ‘girl-boss, boss-babe, boss-lady’ culture of the 2010s captured our attention and just as quickly fell apart.
→ How GenX and Elder Millenian women have watched entrepreneurship go from ‘I guess you just couldn’t get a real job’ to an aspirational title with visions of multi-million dollar valuations.
→ What a group of experienced women entrepreneurs hashed out during a peer-mastermind retreat that reshaped how every single one of us moved forward in our businesses.
→ How specific ‘celebrity entrepreneur’ archetypes have been carefully crafted to create a persona that is easy to trust and buy by short-cutting critical thinking and due dilegence.
→ If you’ve every raised a legit question and been answered with ‘just work on your mindset’, it’s a red-flag about the credibility and experience of the person who sold you the program.
Key Concepts from the Episode
Patriarchy in Pink. Using the language of feminism and female empowerment while selling the exact same structure underneath. Still hustle. Still extraction. Still one person at the top of a pyramid and a large number of people underneath holding it up. The fonts got better and the infrastructure stayed put.
A woman on top doesn’t equal a matriarchy.
Nobody Gets Platformed by Accident. Entrepreneurship went from shorthand for unemployed to a celebrity track inside about twenty years, and the people who rise fastest in it are the ones whose privileges already read as credible before anyone checks anything. Pretty privilege, whiteness, thinness. None of it is actual expertise but it shortcuts building that know, like, and trust.
A designer handbag and red-soled shoes were intentionally selected (literally rented) to carefully create an image of ‘success’ without asking further questions.
The Archetype Shortcut. The BFF next door runs on curated vulnerability. The woo woo crew runs on toxic positivity. The luxury lifestyler runs on status signals that nobody can verify. Using an archetype is not the problem. Engineering one so a buyer skips her own due diligence is.
Archetypes and personal branding are genuinely helpful as small business owners, but they can become harmful when used to craft an inauthentic persona to sell more to people.
Asset Protection Dressed as Coaching. When the carefully built image is the thing generating revenue, a client saying “this isn’t working for me” is not feedback, it is damage. So the answer comes back as raise your vibration, get out of your own way, you’re in scarcity.
Real questions should get real answers. If the first response is to work on your mindset, that’s a red flag 🚩.
Revenue Without the Rest of the Story. The number is the only thing on offer. Not the profit, not the payroll, not the team size, not what it costs to run a business at that volume, not whether the launch that looked enormous actually cleared anything.
Don’t get starry eyed over a supposed multi-million dollar business – it doesn’t tell you a thing about what’s actually happening behind the scenes.
Resources Mentioned
The CEO Ceiling Assessment.Free live diagnostic on Tuesday, October 20 at 12pm ET. Fifty minutes walking the five places your capacity is quietly maxed out, scoring each one green, yellow, or red so you can see which constraint is actually in your way.
The Matriarchy Would Never: Assume You Are The Safety Net. Episode 1 of the series, on the invisible labor built into almost every piece of business advice in circulation.
Kelly Diels on the Female Lifestyle Empowerment Brand.The writer who named the pattern of selling women a lifestyle in the language of empowerment. If you are ready for a rabbit-hole that will open your eyes to how women tend to sell to women, start here.
Duped, with Maggie Patterson and Dr. Michelle Mazur. Two highly experienced communication experts and entrepreneurs, Maggie and Michelle’s podcast goes deep into the problematic practices that have invaded the entrepreneurship space. This episode dives into ‘celebrity entrepreneur archetypes’.
Adam Grant on culture versus cult. “The difference between a culture and a cult is whether people have the freedom to question and challenge the way things are done.” From his podcast Rethinking – Is your organization a little culty?
Connect with Me:
- Instagram: @racheal.cook
- TikTok: @rachealcookmba
- LinkedIn: @rachealcook
- YouTube: @the_ceo_collective
- Website: The CEO Collective
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