Since the original film came out, the girlboss arose as a cultural icon, then plunged into ignominy. Two highly qualified women lost the presidency to Donald Trump. Ruth Bader Ginsburg, once venerated by millennial feminists, foolishly held on to her job so long that she cost Democrats a Supreme Court seat. The corporate feminism of the Facebook executive Sheryl Sandberg was discredited as her company grew more evil. The Wing, a fashionable network of co-working spaces for “women on their way,” imploded.
Online today, angry men rail against working women and their “email jobs” while churning out memes celebrating housewives. Tradwife influencers build lucrative careers modeling submissive domesticity. Young women increasingly distrust the idea of throwing themselves into a job, especially amid a brutal labor market. In “Girls®,” an often sharp new book about the online commodification of young women’s lives, the Gen Z writer Freya India laments that for her generation, work “became an end in itself, the path to female empowerment.” India is a conservative, but her critique is shared by many on the left who dismiss the idea of “dream jobs” with the declaration, “I do not dream of labor.”
This disillusionment with work is understandable, particularly at a time when employers, in keeping with the right-wing turn in our politics, are rolling back policies that supported professional women. Most workplaces no longer boast about a commitment to diversity. Companies that once allowed remote work — a boon to parents — now want their staff in the office. The consulting firm Deloitte plans to cut paid family leave in half and eliminate benefits for IVF for some employees, part of a broader retrenchment across the corporate world. Many women find themselves pushed out of the work force.
In some ways, the death of the girlboss as an ideal has made this backtracking easier. Though corporate America is supposed to be relentlessly focused on the bottom line, it’s often remarkably sensitive to trends. When cultural progressivism was ascendant, so were D.E.I. programs. When feminism was hot, companies competed to make themselves more friendly to women. Now, Mark Zuckerberg, Sandberg’s former boss, extols “masculine energy.” Alex Karp, the reactionary chief executive of the mass surveillance behemoth Palantir, gloats that A.I. will disrupt the power of “highly educated, often female voters, who vote mostly Democrat” while increasing that of working-class men.
The “Devil Wears Prada 2” takes place in a world where the media industry is in free fall, professional expectations have been diminished, and A.I. is sucking the life out of cultural institutions. The men in charge — a callow bro who inherits the parent company of Miranda’s magazine and a tech billionaire who wants to buy it — are philistines. As the movie begins, Andy is fired from her newspaper job by text just before accepting a journalism award. We learn that she never married and has frozen her eggs.
Source:
www.nytimes.com
