Girlbosses in the media: from boom to bust, the parable of an icon

The girlboss is a cultural phenomenon created - and then deconstructed - by media hype. The study The Rise and Fall of the Girlboss: Gender, Social Expectations and Entrepreneurial Hype reconstructs the rise and fall of women entrepreneurs in media narratives. It shows how media portrayals have shaped society's expectations of female managers and helped to determine both their success, and their downfall.

The study - published in the Journal of Business Venturing and recently cited by the journal's editorial team as exemplary in its impact - was led by Antonio Paco Giuliani, a professor at the Department of Business Sciences at the University of Bologna, and Janice Byrne, a professor at the Ivey Business School (London, Canada). The researchers analysed more than 2,600 newspaper, trade magazine and blog articles published between 2014 and 2023, reconstructing the cycle of narratives that led from the celebration of figures such as Sophia Amoruso and Elizabeth Holmes, initially celebrated as symbols of emancipation and success, to their subsequent portrayal as examples of excess and failure.

The girlboss first emerged as a role model in 2014, and until 2016/17 the prevailing narrative was largely positive, with the emphasis on empowerment, ambition and breaking the mould. But between 2016 and 2023, that trend reversed. The tone became critical, with reports of scandals, struggling businesses and a sceptical view of popular feminism and the startup culture.

Ultimately, the figure of the girlboss was deconstructed by the very media that built it.

"The girlboss media cycle offers an important lesson: when we move beyond hype and stereotype, we create space for richer, more resilient stories of female entrepreneurship," says Professor Giuliani. "The fall of the girlboss is not a mere failure: it is a signal that invites us to rethink how we represent women in business, and how we value their contribution.

The study highlights how the narrative strategies employed - from personalisation to trivialisation and demonisation - generate strong emotional swings in the public perception of women entrepreneurs. These devices contribute to a real cycle of hype, during which phases of intense admiration are followed by sudden backlashes.

Within this dynamic, media narratives do not just tell a story of success: they produce it, amplify it and can likewise quickly undermine it. When the mediatic tone changes, the effect not only touches the businesswoman involved in the story, but also helps to redefine the collective imagination about female entrepreneurship as a whole.

This mechanism has a particularly strong effect on underrepresented groups such as women entrepreneurs, who face more rigid social expectations and more limited narrative control. It is precisely for this reason that the authors emphasise the need for more balanced and nuanced media representations that go beyond the simplistic tropes of the 'heroine' or the 'bankrupt', and can capture the complexities of women's entrepreneurial paths.

The gender perspective adopted by the study thus emerges as a useful analytical lens through which we can understand other professional contexts marked by the dynamics of inequality and similar cycles of narrative construction and deconstruction.