I used to believe in the idea of the girlboss. 

That bold, unapologetic woman who “made it”—who finally took up space in rooms once ruled by men. It sounded like progress. Empowering, even. 

But somewhere along the way, it stopped feeling like change. 

Empowerment became performance. 

And when I found myself working in the development world, in NGOs that speak the language of empowerment, inclusion, and capacity building, I realized that the girlboss had simply changed uniforms. 

She now wore a linen blazer, spoke fluent donor-speak, and quoted bell hooks in PowerPoints. 

Patriarchy with Better Branding 

Zillah Eisenstein once called it capitalist patriarchy—the way capitalism doesn’t destroy  patriarchy, but absorbs it. It makes patriarchy efficient, rebrands it as empowerment, and sells  it back to us with a softer smile. 

Maybe NGOs became the perfect ecosystem for that. Because in the name of social change, we often reproduce the same hierarchies we claim to dismantle. 

We talk about representation but rarely about redistribution of power. 

We celebrate women in leadership, but still expect them to lead like men, just more politely. 

We talk about solidarity, but still glorify competition and visibility. 

The girlboss never left. She just learned how to write logframes. 

The NGO Scene 

If you’ve ever worked in an NGO, you probably know the scene. 

The Monday coordination meeting, where everyone talks about empowerment frameworks while the interns quietly take notes and the cleaning lady brings coffee but never sits. The  feminist discourse sounds fluent—intersectionality, inclusivity, lived experience—but the  structure of the room never changes. 

I remember a discussion on “participatory leadership.” The senior manager opened by saying,  “We value everyone’s voice,” and then spoke for the next forty-five minutes. When the youngest staff member finally shared a comment, it was politely dismissed as  “something to be explored later.”

That’s when it hit me: we weren’t practicing feminism. We were performing it. We were fluent in the language of equality, but still illiterate in the practice of sharing power. 

When Feminism Becomes Management Language 

Srilatha Batliwala once said that feminist leadership is not about who sits at the top of the table—it’s about how power is practiced. 

It’s supposed to be collective, relational, and reflexive. 

But in many NGOs I’ve worked with, leadership still looks like control dressed as care. Decisions are top-down. 

Feedback is invited, but rarely acted upon. 

Visibility is rewarded more than vulnerability. 

And somehow, we use feminist vocabulary to justify it.

We call it “mentorship” when it’s gatekeeping. 

We call it “efficiency” when it’s centralization of power. 

We call it “representation” when it’s tokenism with better branding. 

Feminism becomes a vocabulary of management. 

When a woman boss yells, she’s called “assertive.” When she refuses feedback, it’s  “boundary-setting.” 

Meanwhile, junior staff—often younger women—are expected to perform emotional labor: to stay agreeable, to smile through exhaustion, to absorb everyone’s ideals and insecurities. 

Care becomes a one-way street, not a shared ethic. 

The Existential Trap 

Simone de Beauvoir warned us about this. 

In The Second Sex, she wrote that women often become “the Other” not only because men  oppress them, but because they internalize the patriarchal gaze—they start seeing  themselves through the eyes of power. 

The girlboss NGO leader is, in a way, a tragic reflection of that. 

She breaks the glass ceiling but ends up guarding the door. 

She preaches solidarity but rewards individualism. 

She becomes the subject, but only within the grammar of a system built to objectify her. 

It’s not entirely her fault. 

As Beauvoir would say, women don’t escape patriarchy by imitating men—they reproduce  it when they mistake autonomy for domination. 

The Illusion of Progress 

We often assume the presence of women in power automatically means progress. But  representation without transformation is just decoration.

The same structures of exhaustion, competition, and image management exist, just with a  feminist twist. 

We burn out trying to “care” better. We reproduce perfectionism in the name of  “accountability.” 

We mistake self-care workshops for systemic care. 

And so, the system stays intact—only now it speaks in feminist hashtags. Towards a Different Kind of Leadership. 

We don’t need fewer women in leadership. 

We need different kinds of leadership. 

The kind Batliwala imagined—collective, accountable, self-questioning. The kind that allows conflict as growth, not threat. 

The kind that sees care as labor, and emotions as data. 

Maybe that kind of leadership can only exist if we stop worshipping the individual leader  altogether. 

Because feminism was never about creating a new boss. 

It was about making sure no one needs one. 

After the Glass Ceiling 

I’m not anti–girlboss. I’m just tired of seeing feminist vocabulary used to decorate patriarchal  behavior. 

Maybe it’s time we stop celebrating women “breaking the glass ceiling” and start asking why  there’s a ceiling in the first place, and who’s cleaning up the shards. 

Real transformation, as Eisenstein once hinted, isn’t a matter of switching faces at the top.  It’s the slow, painful process of unlearning the hierarchies we’ve been taught to climb. 

And maybe that’s the quiet revolution happening now, but in smaller rooms, where  collaboration replaces competition, and where leadership feels less like command and more  like care.