From Tradwife to Girlboss: What We Got Wrong About How Women Get Ahead

How does a woman – you! – get more of what she wants these days?  

After a lifetime of doing all the ‘right’ things, speaking up, taking charge and asking for more, generations of empowered women still find themselves bumping up against many of the same biases and unequal outcomes as their predecessors.  

When it comes to understanding why this is happening, the answer is not another self-improvement framework. It is something more radical, and more useful than that. But let’s look at how some groups of women have tried other methods first, maybe you’ll see yourself in one of these approaches?  

If you ask an icon of 90s era girl power nostalgia, the answer lies in the next generation. In slogans that teach girls they can be anything they want to be with enough confidence and “girl power”. But even as women raised on the iconic Spice Girl power anthems of the era, age into their peak earnings years, the gender pay gap has stalled out and is estimated to take at least another 30 years to close.  

For the 2010s #girlboss generation, the answer to equity and empowerment has always been about leaning in, hustling longer and grinding harder. But that isn’t exactly working out either: even these women, who are more educated and ambitious than ever, have experienced 3 consecutive years of backsliding political and corporate leadership gains. 

In contrast, and perhaps in response to all the hustle, for the so called #softlife generation, the answer to parity has rested in leaning out. In trading power suits for pilates and self-advocacy for self-care. But again, there has been backlash: leisure remains far more accessible to men, who are rarely (if ever) pushed to subjugate their professional and financial power to access it. 

And then there’s the #tradwife movement. Here, wildly, the trick, apparently to empowerment lies in submission. In performing an overwhelmingly white patriarchal ideal of womanhood to unlock a life of peace, leisure and ease, even if there’s nothing easy about rejecting the 40-hour work week to be on-call 24/7 as a cook, cleaner, driver, personal assistant and nanny for no pay. 

For all the ways in which these approaches differ, their competing visions of “empowered womanhood” all rest on the same fundamental formula. One that teaches women that getting what they want is a matter of self-optimisation. Where what it takes to get ahead or feel a sense of security and freedom isn't about the obstacles in the world around you, like chronic gender bias and a total lack of support, but rather, a personal problem that you can self-help your way out of with the right combination of confidence and self-promotion or service and submission, depending on which vision you subscribe to. 

This framework of empowerment imagines that a woman’s greatest barrier to opportunity is herself, and it keeps our focus turned inward: Am I being too much? Or too little? Too assertive? Or too collaborative? Too warm? Or too tough? These are dangerous questions we should not be forced to ask.  

“Women are criticised so often and on so many things that they are acculturated to receiving such disparagement, taking it seriously, and working to make improvements […] But our research reveals that the problem lies elsewhere,” write PhDs Amy Diehl, Leanne Dzubinksi and Amber Stephenson in a summary of their research. “Virtually any characteristic can be leveraged against a woman in a discriminatory fashion,” they conclude.   

More specifically, their analysis revealed 30 different aspects of a woman’s identity, such as her race, age, parental status, attractiveness, and physical ability, that could be weaponised against her, used to question her competence, or to undermine her ambitions.  

When it came to age, for example, they found that young women could be effectively excluded for being too young while older women could similarly be excluded for being too old, such that there was no ‘right’ age for a woman to be seen as equally worthy of opportunity or support.  

Meanwhile men had the same characteristics reframed as assets.  

A young man’s age could be recast as fresh, new thinking, while an older man’s age could be reframed as important experience and hard-fought wisdom. “This type of treatment is so common that we have called it ‘we want what you aren’t’ discrimination. The clear message to women is that, whatever they are, they are ‘never quite right’,” write Diehl, Dzubinksi and Stephens. “Effectively, the surface-level critique functions as a ‘red herring,’ distracting from the inherent gender bias driving the encounter.”  

These same impossible catch-22s repeatedly show up in the research around women’s choices and behaviours too.  

If a woman is overworked or underpaid, we’re told it’s because she doesn’t ask for more, even as the data repeatedly shows that women remain less likely to get what they ask for and are more likely (than their male peers) to be penalised for speaking up in the first place. In these ways, the belief that women can self-improve their way into getting more of what they want isn’t just flawed, but more and more research finds that the belief in and of itself, distracts from and even enables these systems that actually hold women back.  

We get stuck debating whether it’s better to be a #girlboss or a #tradwife instead of reckoning with the flawed formula itself. The one that imagines our empowerment as an internal and individual project, while overlooking the actual systems of power that reinforce women’s subjugation no matter how much of their ambition they claim.   

So how does a woman get what she wants?  

In recognising that the greatest obstacles to her empowerment, not being able to access the financial security she deserves, the leisure she wants and the respect and rights she is entitled to, is not a personal problem that comes from within her, but a collective problem that is experienced in the world around her. One that isn’t overcome with some new label that trades on the same old broken promise, but in building solidarity and working collectively to reshape and reimagine power in and of itself.  

So instead of blaming yourself when the new male hire with half her sales revenue gets the promotion, or burning yourself out trying find some elusive balance between warmth and assertiveness to be considered ‘likeable,’ or opting out of your professional ambitions entirely, try contextualising your personal experience of inequity within the broader experience of it and tap into the community of those who’ve been through it themselves.  

A community that can take on the problem systemically instead of individually, for example, by practicing pay transparency, proven to reduce such gaps, with trusted peers who offer valuable insights into how opportunities are actually determined and distributed, especially for those more marginalized. And by joining collective conversations in the workplace about adopting (or improving) pay transparency policies. And by checking local laws to understand what workplace protections are already in place and how they’re meant to be implemented and enforced, or need to be.  

Instead of internalising unequal outcomes as something to ‘fix’ about yourself, this vision of empowerment recognises that the real ‘fix’ comes from shifting the environments around you, in working collectively to hold your workplaces, your communities and your institutions to account, so that women are no longer punished for expressing the power that’s already within us all. 

Stefanie O’Connell is the author of the book The Ambition Penalty: How Corporate Culture Tells Women to Step Up — and Then Pushes Them Down, where she debunks the myths that keep women from equal pay, leadership and power, one data point at a time.