Simone and Malcolm Collins break down Inez Stepman’s viral essay “The Myth of the Independent Girlboss” from First Things. They argue that the modern “independent woman” ideal isn’t true independence — it’s heavily subsidized by the state through taxpayer-funded programs, policies, and cultural shifts that externalize costs onto society.

Topics include:

* State-subsidized childcare and education

* Student debt (women hold ~2/3 of it)

* Lawsuit-driven affirmative action and HR bureaucracy

* Child support and alimony as hidden subsidies

* The explosion of “email jobs,” DEI, and nonprofit activism

* Cheap immigrant labor enabling two-income households

* The decline in teaching quality and volunteering turned into paid activism

They discuss how the “girlboss” has been replaced by cultural backlash (tradwife leanings on the right, anti-capitalist vibes on the left), why most “successful” girlboss stories in tech are illusory, and what policy changes (many already happening under the current administration) could shift incentives back toward family and real independence.

Show Notes

The entire concept of the girl boss may have been a lie.

In other words, the concept of an independent professional woman who depends on nobody is a farce, and so-called girlbosses are actually state sponsored.

This is the proposition of Inez Stepman in her essay The Myth of the Independent Girlboss and it really resonated with people.

Inez Stepman’s First Things Essay: The Myth of the Independent Girlboss

The Myth of the Independent Girlboss

Stepman writes: “The Atlantic published an essay by Helen Lewis declaring the “Death of Millennial Feminism,” while in Slate Jill Filipovic defended the girlboss ideal against what she calls an “absolutely enormous antifeminist backlash within which we are all living.” They both take for granted, however, that the girlboss has declined from her cultural primacy. That may be so, but she’s taken no comparable hammering in the world of public policy.”

“Whether the Millennial image of the girlboss, with its shrill first-person confessional style, is fading into cheugy-ness with the inevitable generational pendulum swing, the cornerstone of her appeal, “independence” from men and family, has never been so popular. On Reddit’s infamous r/relationships subreddit, half of all advice given amounts to “leave,” up from 30 percent in 2010 and still climbing. Nearly half of Gen Z choose financial independence over romance when surveyed, and nearly three times as many Americans say having a career they enjoy is more important than getting married or having children. In a 2023 submission to the New York Times’s execrable “Modern Love” series, divorcée Maggie Smith exhorts women “never” to be financially dependent on a man.”

She describes how dependence on anyone has come to be seen as an embarrassment, but argues that women’s dependence has just been shifted from men and family to a complex set of government policies and programs.

“The image of the working woman, the girlboss, remains the sine qua non of independence. After all, she pays her own bills using money she earned herself, or so it seems. But dig into the details and one learns she is propped up from every angle by laws, taxpayer dollars, and the ability to externalize the costs of her lifestyle onto others. In other words, the girlboss is often as much a dependent as Betty Draper, but her dependence is less honest, laundered through public policy.”

Stepman cites:

* State-subsidized childcare

* State-subsidized universities / student loans

* “Higher education is disproportionately attended and staffed by women. It is also funded in large part by the taxpayer, with an output that adds to cultural revolution more than to the wealth of nations.”

* “Women hold two-thirds of outstanding student debt, nearly all of which has been financed by the federal government. Unless serious policy changes are made to defuse this debt bomb, the high default rates will ultimately fall on the taxpayer, through whom the government already owns 93 percent of student loans.”

* “the wild proliferation of “email jobs” and administrative compliance positions that don’t add to the company bottom line”

* Lawsuit-risk-driven affirmative action for women in corporations

* “In 1991, reforms to the Civil Rights Act ensured that lawsuits over (often spurious) sexual harassment claims in the workplace became a major cash cow for litigants. Companies responded by bending the knee to the most easily offended, kicking off the era of “political correctness” and spawning an enormous industry that trains employees not to harass one another. These reforms also raised the stakes for employers to prove they were not discriminating on the basis of sex or race in their hiring and promotion practices, pushing them well beyond meritocracy into de facto affirmative action for women and minorities.”

* One might also throw child support in there

* Was just reading a different article about a divorced mom’s budget

* “I’ve been single for about five years now. Divorce has been a game changer for me. I would recommend it! My marriage afforded me a certain amount of privilege, as my husband made a good salary, and our combined income was close to $200,000. But even though I have less money coming in now, and I receive some child support, I feel more independent and confident about my financial position than when I was married. I think some of it was that when your marriage doesn’t feel secure, it can make you feel financially insecure. And leaving my marriage changed those feelings for me. I’m the only one in charge of my money now, and I like it that way.”

* Salary: Mental health counselor, $85,000

* Child support: $1,750 (Child support payments are not taxable to the recipient and not deductible by the payer)

* Urban-monoculture-driven jobs

* “Even more pernicious is the proliferation of Soviet commissar-style jobs, both in the nonprofit and for-profit sectors, that exist primarily to enforce political agendas rather than to produce value. In the U.S., the number of human resources jobs, three-quarters of which are filled by women, has exploded, roughly doubling from 2014 to 2024. It’s unlikely that managing a payroll has become commensurately burdensome in the past ten years; those additional roles exist to enforce diversity laws. The entire DEI complex is a giant subsidy for make-work positions staffed by women and racial minorities.”

* The outsourcing of domestic labor made possibly by lax immigration policies

* “In major cities such as New York and Los Angeles, up to half the nannies on the books are immigrants, and the real number is likely higher, with many skirting labor laws. The profile of other domestic task-replacers looks similar, with cheap delivery services such as DoorDash and Grubhub, staples for two-income households too harried to cook dinner, incentivizing an enormous black market that rents verified accounts to illegal immigrants.”

* From the cited article: “As of December 2024, [DoorDash] said its screening process prevents over 15,000 prospective Dashers from joining the platform/driving due to failing to submit the necessary criteria. Monthly deactivations of inauthentic accounts have more than doubled compared to 2023, with all of that year’s deactivations already being surpassed by July 2024. The company also says it prevents, weekly and on average, about 4,600 attempts by deactivated Dashers who previously violated verification policies from regaining access.”

Stepman notes the following adverse effects on society:

* Worsening education

* “The quality of teaching, traditionally a feminine profession at least until the college level, has collapsed along a timeline that suggests that diverting talented women into higher-paid careers was the cause. Let’s posit for the sake of argument that it’s better for those ambitious and intelligent women to be lawyers instead of shaping the future minds of both sexes in the classroom. Is it better for society as a whole that teaching has been relegated to a low-scoring backup plan, that still remains predominately female?”

* The cannibalism of volunteering and philanthropy into paid, professional activism

* “Volunteering and philanthropy, on the other hand, once the province of Gilded Age heiresses and women with grown-up children, have been professionalized, through correspondingly multiplying female-staffed NGOs. In short, the feminine impulse toward empathy that use...

Girlbosses Aren't Independent; They're State Sponsored