A.I. is coming for our jobs, fascists are coming for our freedoms and the girl bosses are fighting for their lives.<\/p>\n
Mel Robbins, the lawyer turned empowerment influencer, Reese Witherspoon, the Southern belle turned A-list celebrity turned high-powered Hollywood hitmaker and Emma Grede, the cool girl chief executive of the Kardashian-connected Good American, have outraged a lot of people by influencing too close to the sun. It\u2019s quite a turn of fortunes. The very thing that turbocharged their wealth and popularity now has millions of women giving them the side eye. Have Americans fallen out of love with being influenced?<\/p>\n
The drama revolves around artificial intelligence. In recent weeks, Robbins and Witherspoon each posted a social media video imploring their millions of followers to jump on the A.I. train. In that regard they\u2019re doing what every business executive is doing right now \u2014 warning us that our time is up. Get on board the A.I. train or get run over.<\/p>\n
Robbins took the rah-rah approach. She encouraged women to use A.I. to \u201csave time\u201d and \u201ctake control of your money \u201d by offering to upload their financial documents to Microsoft Copilot. \u201cDon\u2019t be left behind,\u201d she wrote. \u201c#CopilotPartner.\u201d It had all the charisma of an H.R. training video. Witherspoon took the serious, yet approachable tack. She informed her followers that women\u2019s jobs are \u201cthree times more likely to be automated by A.I.,\u201d implying they would be wise to embrace generative A.I. before they\u2019re left behind. It was the influencer equivalent of a scared straight afterschool special.<\/p>\n
A couple of years ago those posts would have been, at most, a viral trend among corporate-influencer types. But now they just make some of this country\u2019s most prominent girl bosses sound as if they don\u2019t even know how to read the room. One wonders if celebrity influencers hawking A.I. under the guise of feminism have even bothered to read the news.<\/p>\n
If they had, they\u2019d have seen that tech titans have gone full heel. Bosses are salivating over A.I.\u2019s overblown promises to make human jobs obsolete. Workers suspect they are being pressured into using A.I. to hasten their own demise. The Pentagon is bullish on A.I. weapons, ushering in a new age of existential dread. Desperate people are turning to chatbots for connection. Some of them found a machine willing to tell them how to commit suicide.<\/p>\n
Nobody wants a parasocial bestie who shills for the plutocrats who are nullifying their votes, degrading their educations, jacking up their power bill, stealing their wages and rigging the system. There is no feminist case for scaring people into adopting A.I. Why would anyone even try?<\/p>\n
That\u2019s what the outraged internet wondered. Response videos called these women corporate shills. (Robbins\u2019s post was a paid endorsement; Witherspoon said her post was merely about being \u201ceducated about this technological revolution.\u201d) The tabloid press joined in. The consensus was that the whole thing stunk of cronyism in service of a technology that is upending people\u2019s lives.<\/p>\n
But also another shift is also happening around celebrity, influence and getting ahead that does not favor the liberal feminist advice-giver. A girl boss is a boss first, girl second. And, bosses aren\u2019t very popular right now.<\/p>\n
Emma Grede is not a household name, but her literary debut (a self-help \u201cleadership\u201d book) tells a similar tale. The book itself has the hallmarks of the confessional tell-all advice genre that once sent women corporate leaders into the public domain. Grede calls herself a \u201cthree-hour mum\u201d because she sees her four children three hours on Saturday and Sunday \u2014 9 a.m. to noon \u2014 and she said she believed that working from home is \u201ccareer suicide\u201d for women who want it all. It\u2019s \u201cLean In\u201d on steroids. Unsurprisingly, her perspective courted its own outrage, from an audience that knows how hypervisibility, ambition and work obsession is fanfic for a corporate workplace that penalizes women whether they are visible or invisible, ambitious or checked out. (In a crossover event last September, Grede had appeared on Robbins\u2019s podcast and called the efficiency A.I. was bringing to her company \u201cthe best thing to happen to us. \u201d As she said: \u201cIf you ain\u2019t using it, use it now.\u201d)<\/p>\n
The girl boss leadership strategy isn\u2019t just outdated; the \u201chow to get ahead\u201d genre is the antithesis of today\u2019s labor market. Getting ahead is for a time when companies are hiring. The A.I. economy we are building promises that companies will be able to make profits without making career paths. That\u2019s the entire selling point.<\/p>\n
So how are you going to claw your way to the top of a pyramid that has no middle?<\/p>\n
I wouldn\u2019t ask the influencers. They aren\u2019t paid to actually solve the riddle, only to make the riddle seem solvable.<\/p>\n
A whole corporate culture of investment, conferences, festivals and promotion invested in the girl boss ecosystem. It became a symbiotic relationship that was all about branding. The girl boss told women what to sacrifice to get ahead, and corporate culture ensured that its women workers never got so far ahead that they no longer needed advice. The message? That there is something good, remunerative and secure to be found in a society driven by work. All the working woman had to do to have everything she ever wanted was to find the perfect calibration of business and home life, of therapy-speak and performative empowerment, of power and privilege.<\/p>\n
The elusive quest for balance was always a fantasy. Now it is a nightmare. The women who have campaigned to lead us through women\u2019s economic futures can offer only platitudes in response. Is it any wonder that women aren\u2019t impressed?<\/p>\n
The age of the girl boss cannot survive the reality of our tech-controlled oligarchy, in which the Nerd Reich<\/a> has captured every sector of life and is actively seeking to remake it in his image. And it is always He \u2014 Bezos, Musk, Zuckerberg, Ellison. That regular people even know their names says that the tech bro has fused with our celebrity culture. Tune into the news, the latest political crisis or the Met Gala and you will see the same cast of too-wealthy, too-powerful characters. A-list celebrities hawking gambling apps and billionaire technocrats are selling the same vision: an economy and a culture that has already left hundreds of thousands of women behind.<\/p>\n After the Covid-19 pandemic disproportionately pushed women out of the work force, Elon Musk used DOGE to massacre the public sector, reducing, as of August 2025<\/a>, Black women\u2019s federal employment participation by 25 percent. It became proof of concept for using A.I. to displace workers. Witherspoon mentioned this threat in her post. She gestured toward new research that shows women are overrepresented in occupations more vulnerable to A.I. disruption. The problem is Witherspoon assumed that displacing women isn\u2019t at least part of the point of rapid A.I. adoption.<\/p>\n When Grede admonishes women who aren\u2019t neglecting their children for most of the week or working from the office, she doesn\u2019t sound out of touch. She sounds downright cruel. Working from home is one of the few ways that some women have managed to survive the tightening economic noose that is cutting off almost every avenue for their economic advancement.<\/p>\n