First step: run to a nearby souvenir store and get pink keyrings, pins, stickers, towels, t-shirts, mugs, phone cases, pencils, posters, tattoos. 

Second step: GET YOURSELF TOGETHER! 

That is all you need. Welcome to the girlboss-hood.  

Theoretically, being a girlboss means turning yourself into a self-made business owner, who is also a feminist and has a passionate resentment towards men. You hold, tightly in your palm, the key elements to navigating the room, making the right decisions with 100% accuracy. You persevere through a stack of work, back-to-back meetings as a career woman, and, the ultimate obstacle, mansplainers.  

Realistically, the criteria mentioned above are the expectations that this systematic world imposes on every boss, not just a girlboss.  

Logically, you are … 

“Leaders,” said Kristina Wong, a Doris Duke Artist Award winner, Guggenheim Fellow, and a Pulitzer Prize finalist in Drama.  

Feeding into the systematic leadership expectations in a capitalistic world, the patriarchy has tainted this term to minimize female leadership. So, if you know, you know: the system is brutally discriminatory, and yet, another constrains we live in. The term “girlboss” essentially scrutinizes a woman’s self-worth through the working lenses, and if she is not a white woman walking down the busy New York city street with a cup of coffee and a working phone, she is not successful; she is not a girlboss. 

“There used to be a term called ‘Girl Power’; it inherently infantilizes the women as ‘girls,’ like we are the Powerpuff version of actual powers in a cute and fun way,” Kristina Wong said.  

So, before considering becoming a girlboss, define the term personally. Then remember that being your own boss does not necessarily mean knowing everything, fulfilling every patriarchal expectation, or swimming upstream in the river of toxic masculinity, but knowing the power of your voice and standing up for yourself. 

“Don’t be that person who does someone else’s jobs well. I make my own work, and no one is going to do that for me,” Kristina Wong said. “We, actually, have to make so much of our world and not relying on the existing system of making.” 

Last step: scrap out the first two steps.