The Revolt Against the Girl Bosses Has Finally Come

Artificial intelligence is coming for our jobs, fascists are coming for our freedoms and the girl bosses are fighting for their lives.

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 company Good American, have outraged a lot of people by influencing too close to the sun. It's 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?

The drama revolves around AI. In recent weeks, Robbins and Witherspoon each posted a social media video imploring their millions of followers to jump on the AI train. In that regard they're doing what every business executive is doing right now -- warning us that our time is up. Get on board the AI train or get run over.

Robbins took the rah-rah approach. She encouraged women to use AI to "save time" and "take control of your money " by offering to upload their financial documents to Microsoft Copilot. "Don't be left behind," she wrote. "#CopilotPartner." It had all the charisma of an HR training video. Witherspoon took the serious, yet approachable tack. She informed her followers that women's jobs are "three times more likely to be automated by AI," implying they would be wise to embrace generative AI before they're left behind. It was the influencer equivalent of a scared straight after-school special.

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's most prominent girl bosses sound as if they don't even know how to read the room. One wonders if celebrity influencers hawking AI under the guise of feminism have even bothered to read the news.

If they had, they'd have seen that tech titans have gone full heel. Bosses are salivating over AI's overblown promises to make human jobs obsolete. Workers suspect they are being pressured into using AI to hasten their own demise. The Pentagon is bullish on AI 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.

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 AI. Why would anyone even try?

That's what the outraged internet wondered. Response videos called these women corporate shills. (Robbins' post was a paid endorsement; Witherspoon said her post was merely about being "educated about this technological revolution.") The tabloid press joined in. The consensus was that the whole thing stunk of cronyism in service of a technology that is upending people's lives.

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't very popular right now.

Emma Grede is not a household name, but her literary debut (a self-help "leadership" 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 "three-hour mum" because she sees her four children three hours on Saturday and Sunday -- 9 a.m. to noon -- and she said she believed that working from home is "career suicide" for women who want it all. It's "Lean In" 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' podcast and called the efficiency AI was bringing to her company "the best thing to happen to us. " As she said: "If you ain't using it, use it now.")

The girl boss leadership strategy isn't just outdated; the "how to get ahead" genre is the antithesis of today's labor market. Getting ahead is for a time when companies are hiring. The AI economy we are building promises that companies will be able to make profits without making career paths. That's the entire selling point.

So how are you going to claw your way to the top of a pyramid that has no middle?

I wouldn't ask the influencers. They aren't paid to actually solve the riddle, only to make the riddle seem solvable.

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.

The elusive quest for balance was always a fantasy. Now it is a nightmare. The women who have campaigned to lead us through women's economic futures can offer only platitudes in response. Is it any wonder that women aren't impressed?

The age of the girl boss cannot survive the reality of our tech-controlled oligarchy, in which the Nerd Reich has captured every sector of life and is actively seeking to remake it in his image. And it is always He -- 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.

After the COVID-19 pandemic disproportionately pushed women out of the workforce, Elon Musk used DOGE to massacre the public sector, reducing, as of August 2025, Black women's federal employment participation by 25%. It became proof of concept for using AI 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 AI disruption. The problem is Witherspoon assumed that displacing women isn't at least part of the point of rapid AI adoption.

When Grede admonishes women who aren't neglecting their children for most of the week or working from the office, she doesn't 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.

But, mega influencers hawking AI (reportedly, some of the largest AI brand deals can be worth as much as $600,000) are even more cruel: They're selling the idea of fear. Fear of being left behind works only if you haven't already been left behind. Women can see through the smoke and mirrors. They know that only an almost-trillionaire can afford the future.

Witherspoon, Robbins and Grede are archetypes for dreams too long deferred. Their brands promised us that in a scary world all we needed was a little bit more money to be less afraid. That message belies the truth that women can see with their own eyes. Once, women bought into their message. They earned educational credentials only to be told that they shut men out of schooling. They delayed child bearing to start competitive careers; now their political leaders are telling them that they're failing at making enough babies. They started businesses and brands and built side hustles; now they're being told that they did not do it enough or the right way or for the right people.

Women are facing an economic apocalypse. Democrats have no plan for them. Republicans have a plan, and it's a one-way ticket back to housewifery. The girl bosses who once promised us we could have it all are now selling the same uncritical AI takes as the men.

People can live in suspended terror for only so long. Empowerment won't fix the mess we're in. Women know it now. They're mad as hell. Anyone trying to sell them advice instead of a way to use that anger to build a better world for women deserves to be fired.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

Copyright 2026 The New York Times Company

This story was originally published May 15, 2026 at 8:30 AM.