The Workplace Comedies Reconsidering the Girlboss
At the height of her powers, Elizabeth Holmes, the founder of the fraudulent blood-testing start-up Theranos, basked in the kind of adulation typically reserved for cult leaders. In one upcoming episode from Hulu’s The Dropout, which dramatizes her saga, Elizabeth (played by Amanda Seyfried) perches on yet another stage, at yet another event about being a female CEO. Her every word scores cheers from the audience of college students, most of them young women. “There are always moments of doubt,” she says of her work ethic. “But as women, we have to start believing in ourselves … You have to make sure that if you’re out there and you have a new idea, you don’t listen to a single person who tells you that you can’t do it.”
Holmes’s words might as well have been ripped from the girlboss bible, if such a text defined the 2010s. Today, however, the term while the notion that women can advance professionally through sheer confidence, determination, and hard work has been revealed to be a toxic one. Of late, Hollywood has released series after series about women who built enviable careers on a myth only to fail and fleece their followers in the process. In , Holmes never saves a single life with her “revolutionary” health-care technology. , Anna Delvey ultimately hustles for nothing but unflattering court photos. And in AppleTV+’s , Rebekah Neumann, the wife of a WeWork co-founder, develops a so-called school that withers even before she exits the company.
