"She-e-o" and "Girlboss": A Necessary Distinction or Just Patronising and Demeaning?

The phrases “she-e-o” and “girlboss” have been slowly working their way into articles, reports, Instagram posts and more in an attempt to create a fun, gender specific alternative to “CEO” and other socially male dominated positions. These phrases have been called demeaning and degrading, criticised for preventing women from doing their jobs by placing a heightened focus on their gender.

 

The main issue with these overtly gendered phrases is that they often end up minimising business accomplishments due to gender consistently being made a focal point. The gender of male CEOs is rarely centred when we talk about their accomplishments. For women, however, an accomplishment prefaced with “she-e-o” or any other explicit and heavy mentioning of their gender often takes away from the accomplishment. Language like this indicates that, in society’s eyes, women are never considered on the same playing field as men; female CEOs are never considered equal to male because they are instead the feminised “she-e-o”.

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If these phrases are so demeaning and dividing, why do people use them? The reason why people might spin a gender specific variation on “CEO” might be understood if we delve further into the number of female CEOs in the UK. According to Business Leader, only 6% of UK FTSE 100 CEOs in 2020 were women. Of course, this is only the statistics for CEO positions. As we move down into boardroom positions on the UK FTSE 350, the percentage of women in these roles rises to 34.3%, as stated by The Guardian. By understanding how small these numbers are in comparison to the statistics for men in leadership, we can begin to see why people might feel the need to explicitly note when a CEO is a woman; women in top CEO potions is such a rare occurrence that when it does happen, it must be explicitly noted with a gendered variation on a classic phrase.

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Lurking beneath this seemingly playful variation on “CEO” is the understanding that women are the “other”. Male CEOs are the default whereas female CEOs are the rare “other”, a deviation from a male-centric societal norm and so must be explicitly noted as a spectacle with a gendered phrase like “she-e-o”. These phrases are not simply a cute and playful variation – they expose how leadership roles and CEO positions are socialised and coded as male. Society feels like we need to bring attention to any CEO or leader who isn’t male through an explicitly gendered phrase so that we know they deviate from the norm.

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When aimed at women, these phrases are understandably demeaning. They reduce female leadership to a gimmicky phrase founded on the “othering” of women. But some women have tried to reclaim these phrases for themselves as terms of empowerment, as proof that women are making it into top CEO positions, working against the grain of the patriarchy. While there is definitely some sense of empowerment in this reclamation – a moment of “girl power” to stick it to the patriarchy – it feels transitory and fleeting. By claiming these phrases are empowering for women, we fail to recognise that even though women are becoming CEOs, they still only account for 6% of the UK FTSE 100. That means a staggering 94% are male. Additionally, all six of these women are white. If we try to reclaim these phrases as a fun expression to show how far we’ve come, we are neglecting the fact that no real change has occurred. These statistics indicate that society still has a systemic problem where women, especially women of colour, are not afforded top leadership positions.

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Trying to claim that “she-e-o” and “girlboss” are empowering is society’s attempt to mask true systemic issues with a performative phrase in order to prevent any real change from occurring. When I say this, I do not mean to suggest that the onus is on women to create this systemic change – far from it. I only mean to imply that gendered phrases like “she-e-o” and “girlboss” falsely provide us with a fleeting sense that we’re getting somewhere, finally moving into high leadership and CEO roles. Instead, these phrases should remind us that, for society, women are the “other” that can never truly adopt the traditionally male role of CEO without it being adapted and feminised. By accepting and trying to reclaim such phrases as empowerment, we are agreeing that this small number of white women becoming CEOs is real progress for women. In reality, accepting these phrases as “empowering” does nothing to structurally empower women.

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“She-e-o” and “girlboss” are phrases that are simply not needed when talking about women in leadership – they are demeaning and distract from accomplishments, centring gender instead. Moving forward, we need to create discourse surrounding the societal problem that systemically prevents women, especially women of colour, from becoming CEOs. We don’t need performative “empowering” phrases, we need real change.