“Boss Babe Nation”: How Corporations Convinced Women That Burnout Is Empowerment
Work is freedom... until it's not. We explore how women’s empowerment may be serving capitalism more than women themselves.
At some point in the last few decades, the definition of “empowered woman” underwent a quiet metamorphosis.
Gone were the days of judging life success by love, family, or community. Today, a successful woman is a time-blocked warrior queen with a color-coded Google Calendar, a high-limit Amex card, and exactly 13 minutes per week to herself.
Is she fulfilled? Sure, she’s told she is.
Is she free? Of course. Freedom looks like email at midnight now.
The narrative is elegant:
Career = independence.
Money = power.
Home and family? Nice add-ons, but not the priority.
Just ask the NBC Gen-Z poll, where young women ranked “having children” and “being married” near the bottom of their life priorities. Number one? “A fulfilling job.” Number two? “Enough money to do what I want.”
Which... fine. Makes sense.
Except—how did we all get here, again?
First, Let’s Get Something Straight: Agency Is Good
Let’s just say this right off the bat before someone lights a candle at the altar of the gender studies department: yes, women having agency is a very, very good thing.
No one with a functioning moral compass wants to return to the era when a woman’s “life strategy” consisted of praying she married someone who didn’t cheat, drink, or die young. The right to open your own bank account, leave a bad relationship, get an education, or simply travel alone without needing a male chaperone are massive wins. Women shouldn’t have to rely on a man, a father, or a flimsy prenup to access adulthood.
Agency freed women from economic dependence and social entrapment. It opened the door to self-determination; a basic dignity that, for a long time, was rationed out like some rare luxury.
But agency doesn’t always mean autonomy.
You can choose freely, sure. That’s the headline. But buried in the fine print is a more complicated truth: freedom of choice isn’t always the same as freedom from influence.
When every film, article, panel, and cereal box tells you that making your own money is not just smart but sacred, it’s worth asking who benefits from that idea becoming gospel. And what does it say about our culture when the markers of success for women increasingly look like the exact same benchmarks men were once ridiculed for chasing at the expense of everything else?
Choice is power, yes. But maybe, not all choices are as free as they look.
When “Girl Power” Met “Quarterly Earnings Reports”
What started as the right to work if you chose, slowly morphed into an expectation. The messaging drifted from "You can work" to "You really should. Otherwise, what are you doing with your life?"
Of course, this shift wasn’t handed down from the mountaintop by the ghost of Gloria Steinem. It came with hashtags, keynote panels, and a very enthusiastic assist from the corporate world. What's better than one overworked employee? Two of them.
Living in the same house
Both paying taxes,
Commuting,
Buying productivity tools,
Ordering takeout
…and still not quite making ends meet
Corporations didn’t invent women’s ambition. But they were more than happy to bottle it, and brand it. By the time “girlboss” entered the chat, the deal was already done. Feminism had become market-compatible.
And while women genuinely sought independence, from controlling spouses, financial fragility, societal limits, the system they entered had terms and conditions buried in 6-point font. Terms like: delay children, outsource care, freeze your eggs, perform confidence, and don’t forget to monetize your hobbies.
You got freedom, technically. But freedom to do what? Build a life? Or build a résumé?
And who really got empowered when women leaned in? Let’s just say it wasn’t the nanny being paid minimum wage, or the middle manager with two hours of sleep.
The Poll That Launched a Thousand Discussions
NBC News recently ran a poll asking Gen-Z women to name their top markers of a successful life. When forced to pick just three, the winners were:
A fulfilling job
Enough money to do what you want
Financial independence
Right at the bottom?
Getting married (11th)
Having children (13th)
Now, this doesn’t mean women are swearing off family life en masse. But it does mean that when push comes to shove, success is now defined by what you do, not who you build a life with.
That’s a striking change from the traditional model, where marriage and children were almost synonymous with adulthood. This is more than a gentle shift. It’s a full narrative rewrite.
And it didn’t happen by accident.
When society repeatedly ties your value to what you do, what you earn, what you achieve, of course you’ll internalize it. And when the market rewards individualism and mobility more than stability or interdependence, “family” starts to feel like a luxury item... or maybe even a liability.
So it’s not that motherhood and marriage lost their meaning. It’s that the conditions to prioritize them have quietly eroded. And in their place, we’ve inserted productivity, income, and self-sufficiency as the new sacred values.
The question is: who truly benefits from this inversion of priorities?
Is it the young woman grinding 50-hour weeks just to afford rent and groceries? Or is it the shareholders watching their stock tick up thanks to her time, energy, and a narrative that tells her she’s winning?
The System Isn’t Rigged. It’s Just Conveniently Designed.
Let’s try a thought experiment. A society evolves over a few decades:
Women get access to education, jobs, credit cards, property rights.
Living costs rise to the point that one income no longer covers the basics.
Culture starts to prize visibility, status, and professional identity above all else.
Corporations get a bigger, more competitive labor pool and get to brand themselves as allies to empowerment.
Governments enjoy a larger tax base, lower dependency ratios, and don’t have to fund single-earner family subsidies.
Now ask: what kind of choices are people really making inside that system?
It all looks like progress. Everyone’s got more freedom, more opportunity, more voice. But look a little closer and you see how easily that freedom can become obligation. Not because someone forced you to choose a certain path, but because every signal told you that the other path was the wrong one.
It’s not rigged in the dramatic sense. No smoky backroom. No grand conspiracy. Just a long series of incentives, narratives, and pressures that all lean toward the workplace. Away from the home. And if you opt out, it is made to feel like a social exile.
This isn’t to say women don’t love their work. Many do. But we have to ask why “choosing family first” so often comes with economic penalties, cultural side-eyes, and the vague sense that you’re wasting your potential.
What we call empowerment may actually be adaptation. And the fact that the system benefits so handsomely from that adaptation? Well, that’s just... convenient.
It’s easy to roll your eyes and say, “Oh, so you want to send women back to the 1950s?” That’s the go-to deflection. Critique the system, and suddenly you’re accused of romanticizing apron life and casserole duty.
But that’s not the point.
The point is: what if we stopped pretending there’s only one version of success that counts? What if the woman raising kids, managing a household, and building a stable home was seen as equally valuable as the one climbing the corporate ladder?
It’s not about going backward. It’s about opening space for multiple paths without shame, without penalties, without applause only when there’s a paycheck attached.
The uncomfortable question isn’t why women are working. It’s whether they really feel like there’s a viable alternative.
What happens when family life becomes financially unsustainable, culturally devalued, and logistically impossible? What happens when the “free choice” is shaped by systems that reward productivity but dismiss care?
And who benefits when the only respectable identity is one you can bill for?
At StratEx - Indonesia Business Advisory we help businesses evolve their talent models to embrace flexibility, dignity, and long-term sustainability. Contact us if you want to challenge outdated assumptions about ambition and build more inclusive pathways to success.