Yet, the era did move the needle. “Women executives in the C-suite now make up about 29%, so just under a third. That’s a significant difference from the 17% when we started in 2014,” says Megan McConnell, a partner at McKinsey and co-author of its annual Women in the Workplace report. “There has been meaningful progress in increasing women’s representation, especially at the top of companies.”
Ten years on, the girlboss may be gone. But the tensions she exposed between ambition, capitalism, and whether women can truly reshape the systems they enter remain unresolved. As some of the OG era’s figureheads return and new models of ownership take hold, the question is whether we are entering a girlboss 2.0 and what will be different this time.
The ambition gap isn’t about ambition
For much of the 2010s, women were told that the route to empowerment was to “lean in”, a mantra popularized by Sheryl Sandberg in her 2013 book of the same name. The idea is that women should pursue leadership more assertively, whether that’s by speaking up in meetings, negotiating promotions, or remaining committed to career advancement despite structural inequalities in the workplace — with the hope that once more women reach positions of power, the system itself might begin to change.
But in the years since, the cultural conversation around ambition has shifted sharply. Across social media, new archetypes of womanhood have emerged: tradwives, stay-at-home girlfriends, “soft life” advocates, and burnout feminists, each promising an escape from the relentless productivity that defined the girlboss decade, sometimes wrapped in reactionary ideas about women’s place in society.
That shift is beginning to show up in data. “This was the first year since tracking ambition consistently for five years that we saw a gap,” says McConnell. “We double-checked the analyses several times because it was surprising. The question became: why are we seeing a six-point difference [in ambition] between men and women when we hadn’t seen that before?”
Structural inequalities remain a key factor. This year, for every 100 men promoted, only 93 women were promoted, McConnell says — falling to 74 women of color for every 100 men. In North America, Black women fall furthest behind, with only 60 promoted for every 100 men.
When researchers examined the gap more closely, they found it was not a collapse in motivation but a recalibration of expectations. Many respondents, McConnell says, look at senior roles and question whether the trade-offs are worth it. According to Pew Research, women still earn roughly 84 to 85 cents for every dollar earned by men on average, a pay gap that compounds over time and contributes to the sense that greater responsibility does not always translate to proportional financial reward.
“Women look up and see the quality of life of those currently in those roles, and it doesn’t necessarily seem admirable,” McConnell explains, citing the combined pressures of work and caregiving responsibilities that men do not face in the same way.
Crucially, when McKinsey adjusted the data to account for career support, including sponsorship, stretch opportunities, and active managerial advocacy, the ambition gap largely disappeared. “What the data shows is that there is both an ambition gap and a support gap,” McConnell says. “If companies address the support gap, the ambition gap should close.”
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