The tension had been fomenting for a while, but it was most undeniable in the months leading up to the 2024 presidential election, when anxieties about “men falling behind” escalated to a fever pitch in American media. Richard Reeves declared in the Wall Street Journal that what was actually “on the ballot” was “American Manhood,” a telling sentiment when what was literally on the ballot was a woman (albeit one who, unlike Clinton in 2016, called no attention to that fact). In that sense, this year’s muted acknowledgment feels grimly appropriate. Suddenly, it’s more acceptable to tap out of a sometimes-performative celebration that, in many ways, was “more noise than progress,” as none other than Ellevest founder Sallie Krawcheck said. 

The Financial Times recently reported that 57% of men under the age of 30 in the US “think feminism has gone so far that men are now suffering discrimination.” More distressingly, 36% of women of the same age agreed. How irreparably far-reaching is the Andrew Tate misogyny-slop universe that even one in three young women believe they’re benefiting from some unseen, unfair advantage? I fear we underestimate just how many people, women included, bristle at the idea that gendered economic disparity is still an issue that deserves attention. We’d much rather explain away wage or wealth differences as mere consequences of benign personal preference. The median woman, you see, just chooses to own 55 cents for every dollar the median man owns, because she prefers low-wage work! 

Perhaps the rush of headlines declaring that, “Young women are out-earning young men in several U.S. cities,” as one 2022 report found, are to blame, calling attention to the 22 metro areas where women under 30 are at least at parity with their male counterparts. Excellent! Only 228 more to go. (The city that holds the top spot for the largest gender pay gap is where I went to college in the south; coming in second place is the small northern town where I was born. Chip, meet shoulder.) The fact that this reportage spawned even a minor amount of hand-wringing about a looming “reverse gender pay gap” reveals a deep well of cultural anxiety about women’s material progress, even if we claim (or, once claimed) to believe it’s a worthy goal. (To be fair to the piece in question, its author spent most of the word count gently reminding readers that a handful of outperforming, cosmopolitan childless women does not mean we live in a post-feminist utopia—still, the subtext lurking behind the headline is loud.)

Academics like the aforementioned Richard Reeves are dominant in this “men are not all right” space, and what’s most notable about these discussions is the speed with which the conclusion is drawn that obviously, something must be done—boys should be universally held back a year in school because their brains supposedly develop more slowly, he suggests, and this will give them time to catch up to the girls. Or maybe the entire education system should be changed to address boys’ aggregate underperformance! Really, they’re open to anything.

The concern du jour is that women now outnumber men at the university level, apparently proof that young women are gaining ground, but at men’s expense. Celeste Davis has convincingly argued this state of affairs is not due to women being better at school, needing more education to compensate for the likelihood of lower pay, or because colleges are offering too many Women’s Studies seminars on free bleeding, but because of what she calls “male flight”—the tendency for men to avoid predominantly female spaces. Quoting economist and former president of Northwestern University Morty Schapiro, who noticed this trend studying college enrollment, she writes, “When the number of women hits 60%…the men who are there make a swift exit and other men stop joining. There’s a cliff you fall off once you become 60/40 female/male. It then becomes exponentially more difficult to recruit men.” 

In other words, because education has become “feminine” owing to the presence of women, it’s increasingly perceived as a lower-value pursuit. This mirrors the well-documented historical trend in fields that become “feminized” over time—that is, controlling for education and skill, as the gender composition of a labor pool shifts to majority-female, the average pay lowers. “School is now feminine. College is feminine,” Davis writes. “And rule #1 if you want to safely navigate this world as a man? Avoid the feminine.” Fellas, is it gay to know stuff? In this way, earning potential for women and men alike is sacrificed at the altar of masculinity. (Which is, I suppose, a step up from the original intent behind phrases like THE FUTURE IS FEMALE, which second-wave feminist Sally Gearhart meant literally—she once suggested men should be reduced to no more than 10% of the population. Let it be known these are not the gender relations I dream of.)

The difference is that, in the face of these facts about men’s educational outcomes, systemic solutions and major interventions for gender disparity are suddenly on the table. Even supposed biological differences like boys’ “slower brain development” are no excuse for inaction. The wide-ranging, creative solutions open for serious consideration are astounding to behold, as most biological hurdles that primarily shortchange women (like requiring time off to physically carry and deliver a child, leading to lower pay over a lifetime) are treated as shrug-your-shoulders, immutable realities. But they’re connected to consequences that are harder to shrug off: Women are approximately 65% more likely to report leaving paid work to care for a family member, which might explain why they retire with roughly 63% as much retirement income and are 56% more likely to end up in poverty following divorce.

I want to be clear: The problem is not that we’d entertain adjusting the education system to make it work better for boys—the problem is that we’re seemingly uninterested in applying the same level of imagination and commitment to the working world on behalf of women. 

Education aside, we’re also generally more accepting of government-led intervention to rebuild sectors in which offshoring has disproportionately impacted men’s jobs. Bringing manufacturing back to the United States—an industry that’s 70% male—has been a popular talking point, if not an outright political priority, for almost as long as I’ve been alive. Without manufacturing jobs, the thinking goes, millions of young men will be without meaningful employment, and this is a serious problem for society. (Kathryn Edwards, an economist who’s joining me on the show next week, has noted the conspicuous lack of serious consideration that these young men could be rerouted to professions in chronically understaffed fields like nursing, early childhood development, or teaching, which also happen to be majority women.)

In cases where the market allocates resources or jobs away from men, intervention is assumed necessary, legitimate, and important. But when a sector that’s majority women experiences low pay or enters a state of outright market failure, you’re more likely to hear that this is efficient, if unfortunate; the market is merely pricing the value of the work and allocating it accordingly. At issue here is not that the government is comfortable spending hundreds of billions of dollars in an attempt to reestablish US manufacturing, but that it’s unwilling to recognize a similarly sized intervention might be just as necessary elsewhere. 

My fast-growing female prefrontal cortex’s alarm system, trained on decades of feminine self-policing, has been ringing the entire time I’ve been writing this, alerting me to the eyerolls and emails this essay will no doubt generate. Every time I write about women, I am rewarded with an onslaught of term papers arguing I have simply misunderstood; the data is wrong, or, no, wait, the data is correct, but it’s because of this other factor that, sorry, we actually can’t change. Won’t I at least concede that women could study engineering instead? Won’t I consider the natural differences—that women are the ones who have babies and enjoy being around children and choose lower-paying jobs? Suddenly, unlike with the speed of brain development or the predictable results of global free trade, a commitment to our “natural” limitations or current market outcomes is cast as unavoidable; a desire to balance the scales to correct for suboptimal realities, naïve. 

A phrase became popular during the Women’s Rights movement of the late 1960s and 1970s when it was used as the title of an essay: The personal is political. It was intended to widen the scope of what we considered “political” problems, that is, problems shaped by broader power structures. Most people at the time saw issues like marriage, children, and work as individual, personal problems to be sorted privately, and this phrase expanded the public’s consciousness about what might be possible if we dreamed bigger. Today, you’re more likely to hear the phrase interpreted in its inverse: to encourage the individual to embody political principles in their personal life. 

The “men are not all right” discourse proved we know how to recognize the limits of personal choice. We know how to treat problems like crumbling job opportunities or gaps in educational outcomes with the appropriate level of concern and serious consideration for who’s being left behind; to engage in thinking that treats gendered disparities as structural questions of political will, not issues of personal failure and alleged biological inadequacy. These conversations often—rightly!—sidestepped debates about whether it’s culture or biology or free markets, and jumped straight to solutions, taking for granted that we owed men better outcomes.

Surely we can look at women’s current set of outcomes—55 cents in median wealth, meaningful overrepresentation in low-wage work and poverty, more precarious retirements—and extend the same level of resolve and legitimacy. I hear there’s a new book coming out in June that deals with exactly this.  

An aside: We’ve gotten a number of emails from former Ellevest users understandably expressing concern about their assets being transferred and asking questions about Betterment. We’ve been big fans of Betterment’s investing platform for years, so if you’d like to stick with a roboadvisor, you’re in good hands.

My pass through Sephora always feels like a vestige from a former life. I find myself winding through its aisles the same way you might mindlessly reenact an old work commute when you zone out while driving. It’s a place that induces the vague urge to wash my hands, every surface covered in shimmering mica dust, the air thick with competing fragrances. Sephora is a liminal space of feminine potential. In it, I am confronted with my dormant aspirations—not exactly self-aware, but aware of myself in a way that I was not just moments before crossing its black-and-white threshold into mirrored walls and asterisked claims of product efficacy. 

In a place like Sephora, the unruly realities of your human body are thrust into stage lighting, ready to be exfoliated and contoured into submission for $48 plus tax by something with a malevolently whimsical name like “Bum Bum Cream.”

No matter the day or time that my quarterly spiritual walkabout delivers me to the floor of a Sephora, it is always buzzing with throngs of women and 10-year-old girls. You can imagine a boardroom of Visa suits celebrating this bright spot amidst the otherwise slow, aching death of brick and mortar. The store dependably posts record-breaking revenue and profits year after year, up 25% in 2023 with nearly $20 billion in sales. This is a place of abject overwhelm: a glossy Home Depot for every square inch of your face, body, hair, personhood. The presence of so many purported solutions implies many problems worth solving. Here, you’ll find legitimately endless artificial paths to natural beauty. 

The market is always eager to meet you where you are, including—if you’ll let them—in bed, which facilitates a sort of aesthetic maintenance creep. With facial jockstraps and wrinkle prevention paper mache, now our efforts can continue all night long! If culture critic Jessica DeFino were here, she’d remind us that the skin is an organ that “breathes” and must communicate with its environment at night to regulate itself, so smothering it with single-use plastics interferes with its natural functioning. Let women enjoy things, publications like Glamour would probably counter, marketing-speak that equates the extraction of our money and rest with recreation like bird-watching or staring into the abyss. Ladies, we’re all having fun here, right? 

Beauty is the only form of capital that women are encouraged to openly, shamelessly pursue, so to the extent accumulating capital is enjoyable, I suppose we’re having a bit of fun. If the privilege that accompanies conventionally good looks is the primary power afforded to us without cultural objection, it’s rational to spend our time and money enhancing those looks, right? Plus, there are rewards! Studies show that women who perform beauty’s labor report higher incomes, an observation that writer and philosopher Kate Manne points out is not necessarily about becoming more attractive, but “conspicuous compliance”—signaling your willingness to devote your energy and resources to its onerous, evolving project. 

On this particular Sephora trip, I gravitated to the section for Glossier, the makeup brand least willing to admit it’s makeup, which is just the way I like it. While inspecting testers and stealing increasingly dissatisfied glances at my bare face in the mirror, I did something out of character post-Hot Girl Hamster Wheel reformation: I plucked the last millennial-pink lipstick tube for an evidently popular color called “Fête” (fun!) and got in line behind 15 other people to spend $22. 

We snaked slowly through the load-bearing stanchions of travel-size luxury personal care products, which allowed plenty of time for buyer’s remorse to settle in my gut before I reached the cashier. Nevertheless, she persisted, credit card thrust forward by the ancient spirits of Hot Girls past. I walked out in a fugue state, gripping the ropy handles of my tiny, striped prize.

The next morning when I got out of the shower, I carefully applied my pink goop and studied myself in the mirror. Immediately, I knew the color was all wrong. It made my face, which is permanently flushed thanks to an extended teenage tour on Accutane, look even redder. Not only did I now possess a lip color I did not want, but I was reminded of this other “problem” I usually ignore—my bright red face—which felt suddenly unacceptable to me. 

This is the ambush of ceding an inch to aesthetic labor: It will always return for its due mile. In the industrialized west, beauty standards are just a very specific, powerful manifestation of capitalism, so of course we must keep inventing new gimmicks and increasing their demands. How else do LVMH’s shareholders achieve 25% year-over-year growth? What begins as an innocent stroll through a mall pursuing a whiff of cinnamon-sugar pretzel and some harmless cashmere sweater groping ends with the rediscovery of an old insecurity. 

In the most extreme cases, the appearances formerly achieved with makeup are now “embedded directly into [the] face.” We are told by the corporations that sell us these things that they are safe, effective, breezy: Take dermal fillers, for example, a popular, semi-permanent method of plumping the skin. Once (and maybe still) widely believed to be metabolized after a few months, MRIs reveal they do not, in fact, dissolve on their own. Instead, they simply migrate to other areas, creating a thin, even layer under the skin that can only be fully broken down with the injection of another product, one that disintegrates not just the filler, but your own naturally occurring chemicals. In order to add dimension back to the face, what must one do? More dermal filler! 

In a sinister twist, these products and procedures often interact poorly with one another and accumulate in an undesirable way, creating a paradoxical need for even more of them. It’s a little like the adverse reactions caused by a drug cocktail: You take something to stop feeling nauseous, but it makes you break out into hives, so you take something to make the hives go away, but that makes you feel groggy, so you take something to feel more awake, but that makes you anxious, and the anxiety, in turn, causes nausea. You are now somewhere worse than “square one.” (It’s worth mentioning again that my permanent skin sensitivity was caused by an intervention to rid me of a different natural skin process, acne.)

Bearing all this in mind post-lipstick application, I decided to initiate a less familiar retail odyssey: a return. Once again, I got in the car, drove across town, parked outside Nordstrom, walked through the men’s section, the ladies shoes, past the Lululemon, the Apple Store, and back into Sephora, even more bustling than it had been the day before. I got in a longer line and stewed in private embarrassment while I waited my turn to get a refund for my ill-fated impulse buy. 

As we shuffled toward three overheating registers, I remembered my dissatisfaction with my flushed face and Googled “best moisturizers for red skin.” The first result loaded: a green tube of something called “Dr. Jart” appeared. Doctor? Sounds legit. I poked my head out from behind the teenage girl in front of me and scanned the perimeter of the store: There it was, in the farthest corner: Dr. Jart. My pulse quickened. Neutralize redness!, the product’s description commanded from my screen. Yes, I pledged, I shall. 

A dozen people had already filled in behind me, and I felt conflicted about losing my spot. I debated asking the woman standing next to me if she’d hold my place while I inspected this New Product That Would Change Everything, but decided against it as I imagined saying these words aloud. Resigned to accept my rosy human skin and cut my losses, I decided to stay the course. Then I saw it. 

Just around the corner of checkout minis: Dr. Jart. A travel-sized…something! I couldn’t believe my luck. I lunged toward one of the last remaining jars. 120 seconds ago, I hadn’t known this cream existed, and now, the union of hand and jar(t) electrified my nervous system. Having sworn off most makeup on principle, I began a desperate rationalization: This is skincare, not makeup! It has SPF! I’m not enhancing! I’m just neutralizing! Houston, we’ve discovered a loophole.

Sephora, with its glowing islands of “clinically proven” tinctures, empowerment-coded signage (boost collagen because feminism!!!), and check-out line that keeps on selling until the bitter end, is perfectly calibrated to produce this exact experience. Beauty can shapeshift to accommodate whatever self-aware hangups an easy mark like me might carry while skeptically dabbing sample goo on broken capillaries—a self-acceptance rollercoaster reduced, once again, to a single credit entry on Bernard Arnault’s infinite profit-and-loss statement.

I wasn’t yet a self-proclaimed personal finance nerd, so the lifestyles surrounding me were often confounding. There was the entry-level executive assistant who drove the brand-new Lexus and lived in a one-bedroom apartment with humongous walk-in closets, the couple who owned a gorgeous home in our city’s upscale suburb despite neither holding a job that could explain such a purchase, and mostly, there was a lot of discretionary spending at bars, restaurants, boutique gyms, and shops. The most challenging to parse were those on the cusp of plausibility: Yeah, he’s an electrical engineer…but a penthouse and a doorman? A lot of it didn’t add up. 

Over time, an uncomfortable disorientation seeped in. My lifestyle looked nothing like theirs, yet I knew enough to deduce we were in relatively similar pay bands. I was fumbling for different ways to ask the same awkward question—How are you pulling this off?—which was usually a translation of an even more uncomfortable itch: I must be doing something wrong.

Now that I’m loosely aligned with a network of folks who hustle in their free time to speed up their wealth accumulation process, I know what “normal person” quick progress looks like—and this wasn’t it.

In my confusion, I concocted theories.

“Maybe they know which hot stocks to invest in.”

“Maybe they found a really talented lender and accountant. Do I need an accountant?”

“Maybe they have some of that ‘passive income’ I keep hearing about on Instagram.” 

Having no idea how investing worked at the time, my imagination filled in the gaps with increasingly unlikely explanations. Of course, now I look back and know better. The real answer is the world’s oldest riddle: What’s great if you can get it but absolutely befuddling if you can’t? Family money.

This knowledge has been one of the greatest side effects of learning how saving and investing works. It lifts the mysterious mathematical fog shrouding illogical situations, simplifying and ventilating feelings of shame or inadequacy. You know Jennifer earns $54,000 but owns a $900,000 home in the part of town with the best walkable coffee shops? It’s not a secret, hard-to-find mortgage product that you’re too unsavvy to access or a first-time homeowner program for which you missed the application period. It’s—say it with me!—family money. We shouldn’t begrudge Jennifer; though, of course we’re human, so we might. I know if I were offered a three-bedroom hand-me-down from some wealthy relative, I’d gladly accept, too. 

Still, it’s good to know: If a person is inexplicably well off, someone who came before them must’ve put in the time and compounding on their behalf. This is great news. It means you can adjust your comparison standard for the inflation of rich parents and quit blaming yourself. 

Comparing yourself to others is almost always fraught, but in the uncertain throes of early adulthood, it can be an irresistible (and somewhat practical) measuring stick. Comparison is how we make sense of ourselves in a world without absolutes. It’s natural. But to be helpful, it must first be calibrated accurately.

In 1% of scenarios, you’ll encounter that adolescent freak of nature who, at age 12, cornered the lawn-mowing market in their suburb and funneled the proceeds directly into pre-stock split AMZN, and her million-dollar home at 25 years old is merely evidence of her prodigious entrepreneurial acumen and ability to allocate capital. But this is, far and away, the exception to the rule. 

Here, people will point to surveys about inheritance and claim that “fewer than 20% of people inherit their wealth,” but we must take a wider (and less literal) view: I wouldn’t check “yes” on a survey asking if I inherited my wealth, but my parents allowed me to graduate debt-free, gave me a car, and paid for most of my wedding. Just because their contributions to my bottom line prevented it from becoming negative rather than boosted it into six-figure territory doesn’t mean I didn’t benefit from the choices they made. Does someone whose parents put down the money for their first home report an inheritance on a survey? 

Self-reported data about how and why someone has what they do isn’t a reliable gauge of the phenomenon I’m describing here, which relies less on giant, one-time cash transfers and more on a consistent pattern of compounding small advantages over many years—from receiving rent stipends to covertly using a parent’s AmEx for groceries, insurance, and gas or accessing your dad’s Delta miles for semifrequent first-class international trips. For all our talk about generational wealth, it’s fairly challenging to quantify where a relative’s benevolence ends and a young person’s self-sufficiency begins. 

Still, some of it is quantifiable: The 25-year-old in Manhattan whose parents foot the bill for all fixed expenses such that a meager entry-level salary can be spent entirely on discretionary whims is providing a boost that, to an outsider, would appear nonsensical. If you didn’t know any better, it’d be easy to assume that you must be uniquely failing at capitalism, rather than simply having been dealt a hand that looks more like a foot.

But one of the first lessons you learn in any personal finance education (at least, that which doesn’t come from someone trying to sell you a crypto arbitrage course) is that there are no shortcuts. You must either earn a lot of money, invest consistently for a long time, or some combination of the two. In the absence of both, you can assume a third path:

Maybe she’s born with it. Maybe…oh, wait. Yeah. She’s born with it.

I couldn’t resist naming this essay “Local Woman Discovers Leisure in European City,” as I recently learned all the cliches about life in Paris (and my reactions to them, as a former girl from the Kentucky suburbs) are deserved.

Yes, the food tastes better, and somehow even a straight pastry-and-cheese diet didn’t make me feel like a walking GMO. Yes, people really do rip cigarettes and espresso on patios at all hours of the day and all days of the week, and they’re doing it for pleasure, not to fire up the cylinders for a cubicle marathon.

Walking through Paris felt like sliding into a different time register. We slept until 10, drank coffee with dinner, and floated down wide, cobblestone streets, earning side eyes and open jeering from French people who didn’t find our tacky, American joy very palatable (the sequins and glitter probably didn’t help). I embraced the sort of vacation mentality that only feels possible in Europe, where it somehow always feels like everyone else is kind of on vacation, too.

I allowed these indulgences while maintaining an acute awareness of the fact that it was precisely the opposite behavior—going to bed by 10, sitting at a desk all day, keeping a firm grip on everything around me—that enabled me to take such a trip in the first place; that is, without going into debt or financially compromising Future Me. This is a weird conflict with implications I’m still untangling.

It made me wonder who I might have become had I grown up attuned to that frequency, and not the frenetic, achievement-oriented one that begins plotting college admissions in kindergarten and making five-year plans for slotting childbirth into a ruthless ladder ascension. 

I came back to the US on a high after spending 72 hours with my closest friends: women who are vibrant, sharp, and magnetic, each leading a full, meaningful life. It’s probably safe to say I’m the most one-dimensionally work- and money-obsessed in the bunch, and being around them reminded me of the importance of things like hobbies, slowing down, and—dare I say—just messing around. 

During my 24-hour trek back to California, my feeds became saturated with clips from a commencement speech at Benedictine College that was going viral. In it, a man younger than I am extolled the virtues of traditional femininity (among other things) to an unsuspecting crowd of 22-year-olds. The speech had only been delivered 48 hours prior, but already an ample discourse had begun.

He addressed the “ladies” in the room—on the day of their college graduation—and said he’d “venture to guess” that while “some” of them “may” go on to have careers, “the majority” are probably “most excited” about their marriages and future children. (Effectively no modern political issue, no matter how seemingly irrelevant to the circumstances, made it through the 20-minute tirade unscathed.)

He was duly roasted. But predictably, the same old back-and-forth took shape in comment sections with people shouting past one another. “Nowhere did he say women couldn’t have both,” one person commented, “Women can have it all, family and career.” “Right,” another fired back, “He just said that a woman’s life doesn’t begin until she accepts her role as a wife and mother.” 

On its face, splitting hairs over the rhetoric of a 28-year-old man who gets paid $4 million per year to kick balls for a living is absurd. We all know being a homemaker is a legitimate job that some people find very fulfilling; we all know it’s ridiculous to suggest it’s inherently the most fulfilling occupation every woman could aspire to (the nuns at Benedictine agreed, disavowing his statements afterward), and more ridiculous still to accept a young man as a credible source on women’s path to contentment. Frustrated by the familiar dialogue, I ended up channeling my feelings via a reprisal of a Taylor Swift song. It’s Female Rage: The Musical.

This schism is familiar: Pitting stay-at-home moms against women who want careers. The tradwives vs. the girlbosses in a pay-per-view cagematch, caricatures of feminine nurturing and ambition. Traditionally (and by traditionally, I mean, the 1980s), “having it all” meant a family and a career—but only for women, obviously, since a man with a family and a career is…just a man.

The promise coming from the tradwife corner is that ambition is a trap and one should retreat into the supposedly more “natural” soft life of the family instead, presuming these are the only two spheres in which a woman can find meaning. 

As such, a common retort when a woman expresses a desire to remain single or childfree goes something like this: Your career won’t love you back (the implication being, of course, that children are like Tamagotchis, and if you birth, feed, and bathe one, the return on emotional investment is all but guaranteed). 

Following my weekend in Paris with my three best friends (all of whom are unmarried Gen Z/millennial cuspers), I was struck by the utter lack of this binary. If my friends are any indication, this generation’s definition of a full life extends far beyond both the grinding hustle of unchecked careerist ambition and the often thankless domestic labor that accompanies motherhood in a world where women statistically bear a disproportionate amount of the work. (It would appear US birth rates are at an all-time low, so maybe this observation goes beyond the anecdotal.) 

A full life might mean forgoing the benefits and drawbacks of focusing too intensely on either, at least for a while. We stayed up late at cafés talking about the Parisian open mic nights where my friend performed before the rest of us arrived; about another friend’s recent art exhibit at a gallery and her backcountry skiing hobby. The other guided me through breathwork and gave me tips on raising my chronically low HRV, something she knows a lot about after years of independently studying and practicing meditation. We talked about the best books we’d read recently, regaled one another with lawless college stories, and debated the practicality of wearing silk scarves unironically back on our home continent (jury’s still out).

What was notably absent from these discussions: talks of romantic partners, any whisper of eventual children, or serious career considerations. My friends date and enjoy their jobs to varying degrees, but much like their French counterparts, they work to live, not live to work.

I want more of this, I decided from the bubble of our easy togetherness, admiring the full, well-rounded lives my friends have created. This thought was followed swiftly by an uncomfortable realization: the lifestyle that enabled these sumptuous conditions on my behalf was the antithesis of them.

Some of this is undoubtedly the natural delusion we all feel on vacations (“I’m going to move here!”), but there’s a larger, structural dynamic at play. As our personal lives and preferences evolve, it almost definitionally upends the structure of our financial lives, too. Whether that’s because you decide to become a parent, change careers, or simply pour more of your limited time and energy into enjoying your life. Priorities are not static.

So maybe the centrality of the traditional “having it all” narrative in the conversation about women’s lives has outlived its usefulness. It hardly feels capable of illustrating the multitudes that my friends’ lives contain: passion, art, music, emotional regulation, self-inquiry, leisure, curiosity, adventure, and untold other endeavors that have nothing to do with their relationship to anyone else, be it spouse, boss, or offspring.

We play an important role in one another’s lives, too. It’s strange how the fierce bonds of female friendship never seem to enter the equation when women are lectured about how their careers will never love them back.

By the time the rose made it back to the front of the room, it was greasy and wilted, having passed through dozens of Cheeto-dusted fingers. “This,” he exclaimed, holding up the soggy flower, “is what happens to you when you have multiple sexual partners.” (The physics of how the same person touching the petals over and over again wouldn’t similarly disfigure the flower was a plot hole in this analogy that he never addressed.) 

Predictably, girls around the room stared wide-eyed at the slimy, disintegrating mess that supposedly represented their desirability and worthiness post-fornication at last year’s junior prom. Then they burst into tears. 

He closed his session by handing out fresh roses with haphazardly torn pieces of notebook paper affixed that read in scratchy, boy handwriting, “You’re worth waiting for.” Gee, thanks, Garrett. 

I didn’t tell my parents about these experiences or talk to anyone outside of these classrooms about them. In retrospect, this message struck me as so horrifyingly problematic that I wasn’t sure if it was a fever dream I conjured from watching too much 19 Kids and Counting, but I recently scoured my Facebook archives and found this in an album called “Homecoming 2012 and Senior Retreat”:

Federally funded abstinence-only messaging and the “true love waits” movement began infiltrating even secular high schools in 1996, but we got the radioactive version in Catholic school. It’s well-documented now that purity culture—the religious emphasis on a woman’s virginity as part of her value and sanctity—creates a psychological minefield. (I asked my husband, who went to an Episcopalian all-boy school, if he received any such education around his sexual purity, and he stared back at me, blinking slowly, before replying, “No…?”)

We know that teaching adolescent women that sexuality is shameful and dirty makes it physiologically challenging for them to suddenly embrace the thing that supposedly defiles their virtue, even within the context where it’s permissible (i.e., marriage).

I’ve been thinking recently about the way mainstream personal finance approaches spending money in a parallel way—purity finance, if you will. Spending is something you should only enjoy once you’re already wealthy, and until then, it’s the enemy of financial prudence. Perhaps the most famous personal finance educator in the world, Dave Ramsey, is quoted saying, “If you’re having financial issues, the only time you should see the inside of a restaurant is if you’re working there.” His radio show reportedly has 14 million listeners each week.

Most of our perceptions around being “good” with money involve a moralized framework that positions saving as virtuous (and, by extension, spending as something to do as infrequently, minimally, and attentively as possible). Overpaying for something is heresy. Debt is the gravest sin.

I can’t even count the number of conversations I’ve had in recent years with very wealthy individuals—those with net worths in the multi-millions—who now struggle to spend money on anything because they’ve adopted ultra-frugal saving as a core tenet of what it means to be “good,” or at the very least, “good with money.” 

We’re accustomed to denigrating those who blow through every cent that enters their checking account, but we rarely pathologize the person who’s worth $5 million and still comparison-shops for strawberries.

When you believe for your entire working life that saving money is “good” and spending money is “bad,” the idea that you’ll be able to abruptly throw it in reverse and spend freely upon entering retirement is not a realistic expectation. Even though you now occupy the context in which spending is sanctioned in this framework (the very thing you’ve been saving for!), the connection between spending and irresponsibility is often too entrenched.

Purity finance operates from a default posture of control, which assumes people are incapable of holding two truths at once: that saving for the future is important, and spending enthusiastically on things you value is healthy. 

What’s not healthy is a religion of fear-based, rampant accumulation, or guiltily refracting every purchase through the lens of a compound interest calculator like a gal with the threat of a Cheeto dust-covered perennial hanging over her head. The irony is that, in an effort to carefully preserve something for future enjoyment (whether that be sexual “purity” in marriage or the largest nest egg possible for retirement), you inadvertently internalize a message that damages your ability to ever enjoy it.

I noticed recently that each “tap” of my AmEx brings with it vague pangs of guilt, regardless of what I’m buying. To combat this, I’m focusing on reorienting my internal editorializing of my purchases the moment I make them. Rather than, Wow, $110? This is only four days of food, it’s, I’m so excited about these groceries; they’re going to make such good meals this week. Rather than, Ugh, professional help is expensive…is this wasteful? it’s, I’m so happy I get to support this woman’s business; she’s helping me live a better life.

A thriving relationship with money requires an ability to save for Future You and freely invest in Present You, because you’ll only ever experience your connection with money in the present—as Eckhart Tolle writes, “the future never comes.”

When two thinkbois face off (like when Nassim Taleb attacked Lex Fridman, unprovoked, violating the cardinal rule of always accepting podcast invites), it was an affront to the solid, united core. The aggressor, Taleb, was mostly shouted down for his slight, and armies of Fridman fans flocked to his defense. 

This isn’t my way of saying I think the thinkboi support network is a bad thing—on the contrary, I wish there were more women benefiting from the same. The thinkboi network is, after all, heavy on the “boi.” They outwardly and effusively weave a web of mentions, backlinks, and namedrops, nary a lady in sight.

To be fair, I don’t think anyone is intentionally excluding women—but because online idea market share operates on a power law where 90% of the attention concentrates around 10% of the voices, it’s a self-sustaining centrifuge that has the effect of pushing everyone else to the periphery.

The warm and fuzzy feelings of inclusivity and connectedness between the thinkbois are great, but it’s not just about feeling good: These support networks are valuable. They lead to real opportunities. These men are one or two degrees of separation away from some of the most prolific builders and wealthiest venture capitalists in the world. The thinkbois seem to recognize that, in boosting one another’s work, they align themselves with power. 

Where did all the girlbosses go? Well, look no further than the litany of Gaslight Gatekeep Girlboss Downfall thinkpieces for breadcrumbs. 

Dan Frommer wrote for the New Consumer that “female founders get publicly flogged for managerial flaws that range, depending on the situation, from petty nonsense to securities fraud. These stories perform well for their publications, are seen as ‘telling truth to power,’ and occasionally serve the broader public—see: Theranos—so they’ll continue to be published.”

The difference in dynamics between the ThinkBoi Aristocracy and the “Girlboss Gotcha” exposé culture is stark. The former is—while occasionally reductive and unintentionally satirical—ultimately a generative source, while the latter feels eager to catch someone sending an insensitive email.

There’s a schadenfreude that accompanies the news that a beloved female founder was actually a hard-charging tyrant from a privileged background with unrealistic expectations. Hardly any founder has been more publicly scrutinized than Sophia Amoruso, an entrepreneur who bootstrapped her first business to $100 million in just a few years and then went on to build two more successful operations. 

To be sure, some of the allegations against these women were serious—but there’s a funhouse mirror effect to much of the coverage, where the substantive criticism blurs with thinly veiled misogyny. Once open season began on the girlbosses for their legitimately harmful missteps, the mediagenic female founder became a meme. To be worthy of power, we seemed to collectively decide, a woman must be perfect. 

It didn’t come into focus for me until I read Meltzer’s book, Glossy, which told the story of “ambition, beauty, and the inside story of [another prominent female founder] Emily Weiss’s Glossier.” There was something that didn’t quite sit right with me—it was framed like a tell-all, but didn’t seem to reveal much in the way of genuinely problematic behavior from Weiss. 

Ashley Mayer, former head of communications at Glossier, wrote a reaction piece that went viral after Glossy dropped. “While [the book] isn’t another female founder ‘takedown,’ it also isn’t a book that would be written about a male CEO. The dominant critiques of Emily focus on her privilege and ambition, two traits I can’t imagine being used to undermine the successes of her male peers.”

Of course, exploitation, harassment, and discrimination should be rooted out regardless of the perpetrator—the criticism is not, “Well, women should be allowed to treat people like shit, too.” But as Mayer wrote, “When even the most successful women leaders are picked apart, there’s a widespread silencing effect.”

Some suggest this is a good thing. Elizabeth Segran, witnessing the pile-ons the first generation of girlbosses suffered, advised us in Fast Company to keep going, but just do it…more quietly. As in, Be a little more ladylike about it. 

But in a world where only 10% of Fortune 500 CEOs are women (despite making up 47% of the workforce) and only 2% of venture capital funding goes to female founders, our ambitions will only be as strong as the interconnected support system we can build around them. 

We need to be careful about deducing that the solution is to fly under the radar. Doing so keeps us isolated; separated.

Instead, we must loudly, proudly, and publicly align ourselves with one another. For all their internet philosophizing, I think that’s the most important lesson we can learn from the thinkbois.

“Your network is your net worth.”

In that vein, I want to shout out some amazing women in my network, and some who I haven’t met yet but whose work blows me away:

• I love what Simran Kaur is doing with Girls That Invest, and her Instagram presence is consistently inspiring. 

• My BOSSY cohost, Tara Reed, helps underdogs break into tech by teaching them how to build apps without code. I’ve learned a tremendous amount simply from breathing the same air that she does.

• Chelsea Fagan consistently puts her money where her mouth is with The Financial Diet’s four-day workweek and being the fifth-highest earner within her own company (despite being CEO).

• Cinneah El-Amin is teaching people how to job-hop their way to the salaries they deserve with unmatched flair. 

• Tori Dunlap trailblazed the space we now play in with Her First 100K and has achieved more than just about any other young woman in personal finance. 

• Corporate Natalie makes some of the most relatable work TikToks I’ve ever seen, and is always doing fun collabs with Vivian Tu of Your Rich BFF, who has absolutely mastered the art of virality and consumable “quick hit”-style financial tips. 

• Kyla Scanlon is the economic voice that Gen Z so desperately needs, and her rise to prominence has been incredible to witness (see also: the deservedly breathless coverage of her in Fast Company).

• Sana Javeri Kadri disrupted a historically fraught space—the Indian spice trade—by starting an ethically sourced spice company, Diaspora Co. She faces off with a logistical nightmare of global supply chain management that few professionals could imagine (or manage). 

• I doubt if anyone will ever break Alex Cooper’s record deal at Spotify, securing a $60 million three-year contract. Her new venture, the Unwell Network, is a huge inspiration to me. 

I’d be honored to create with, retweet, and join the podcasts of any of these women. I want to shout their accomplishments from the rooftops—because as the thinkbois have shown us, when they win, I win, too.

Here’s to building the next, better era of “girlbossery.”

When I began writing about personal finance, it was to reach other women like me: college-educated young professionals, working their first Real Person jobs, and befuddled by how their biweekly paychecks disappeared from their checking accounts every month like water evaporating in the sun—effortlessly.

Every once in a while, I’d get a message like this: “Do you have any advice for people who don’t make very much?” 

The reasons the senders offered for their financial strain varied: One woman had just gotten divorced and her husband had controlled the money; another worked in a low-wage, dead-end job; someone else was a single mother struggling to afford daycare, while a fourth had tens of thousands of dollars in medical bills from an unexpected diagnosis. Similar themes emerged over time.

My 50/30/20 budgeting models and corporate ladder-climbing strategies were useless to these women, and each one left a tiny, indelible crack in my understanding of “financial literacy” as the key to equality for women.

There were plenty of readers who were ready to take the bull by the horns, make informed choices, and get rich, baby! But there was an equally large contingent for whom the advice to stop going out to eat in order to invest more didn’t make any sense, because they hadn’t been inside a restaurant in months.

The data indicates this latter group might actually be larger than the former, as women are overrepresented in low-wage labor: Women make up less than half of the total workforce, but represent nearly 60% of all low-wage workers, earning under $11 per hour on average. 

And on the whole, we know a woman’s income tends to deteriorate as she ages: The gender wage gap is largest from ages 45 to 54; in that age group, the median US male pulls down $72,228 each year while the median US female earns $57,096.

So I started asking myself: Is an individual woman’s accumulation of wealth an innately “feminist” act?

For our purposes today, I’m defining “feminism” as work that advances the equality of the sexes.

It’s something I’ve been chewing on a lot in recent months as I work on my upcoming book, Rise of the Rich Girls, and, more broadly, exist in this tricky online space where there’s a temptation to recast every financial decision a woman makes as “feminist,” so long as it beefs up her bottom line. 

I say this is “tricky” because, historically speaking, promoting financial equality for women is a pretty progressive thing (it hasn’t even been 50 years since Congress ruled it was illegal for creditors to discriminate based on sex or marital status!). 

But the question opens a few different cans of prickly worms (ew, what an image), because if a woman—any woman!—getting her bag immediately qualifies as an act of feminist empowerment, then is anything she had to do to get that money automatically grandfathered in? (See also: erstwhile Girlboss Elizabeth Holmes.) Is Margot Robbie making $50 million off the Barbie movie this summer a win for the pink team, or is it…just a win for Margot Robbie? 

For the record, this approach has a near-100% success rate on me. Rebrand something as a feminist issue, and this is me:

We ride at dawn, girlies! 

The problem is, it’s remarkably easy to wander down the well-worn path of positioning solutions that might improve your personal situation as somehow intrinsically radical on behalf of Women Everywhere, and my mixed feelings about this misapplication of the transitive property (as someone who creates personal finance content for women) have only grown more mystifying as my platform has grown.

To be clear, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with focusing on individual solutions—after all, taking matters into your own capable hands is often necessary to make any progress at all. And as culture critic Jessica DeFino wryly noted in our episode a few weeks ago, “Yes, systems are to blame, but…we’re individuals that exist within those systems, and you know, paradox…”

Still, ennobling personal advancement (the “limitlessly seductive sales pitch that feminism means, first and foremost, the public demonstration of getting yours,” as Jia Tolentino wrote in Trick Mirror) is a bossbabe magic trick that’s always struck me as a little too convenient. You’re telling me that making myself fabulously rich is also good for women everywhere? Incredible! My duty to the sisterhood has been fulfilled.

Why is this transubstantiation of individual wealth accumulation into high-minded political resistance so appealing? (Again, Tolentino might have our answer: “A politics around getting and spending money is sexier than a politics built around politics.”) 

And why can’t we just let effective individual tactics that work for some women be imperfect solutions in an imperfect world? Is it because we believe, on some level, that if enough individual ships rise up, the tide will rise beneath it? (I think we all probably know enough about that metaphor to realize that’s not how it works.)

This feels especially relevant amidst the magenta gingham press coverage of “Barbie Girl Summer” and countless headlines about how Beyoncé, Taylor Swift, and Barbie are “singlehandedly saving the economy” or how “women own this summer.” But which women? We should specify: These women (and the people who work for them). 

Henah and I both saw Barbie. I scream-cried through the Eras Tour; Henah worshiped at the altar of Queen Bey. Still, I can’t forget: I likely have a lot more in common with the average man than I do with Taylor Swift. Socioeconomic status is, in some ways, a more meaningful stratification tool than gender when you’re talking about a woman with billions of dollars, and it’s been interesting to observe the way the media has quickly applied the economic uber-dominance of three powerful women (Swift, Knowles, and Robbie) like a sparkly weighted blanket over the economic circumstances of “women” as a whole.

Calling this out explicitly feels true but annoying; I wish I could earnestly, uncomplicatedly celebrate the fact that the three biggest entertainers in the world right now are women as though it’s a big, feminist victory—but it mostly just feels like a big capitalist victory (which is fun, because pink!, but it’s a “win for women” in a game that most women aren’t playing).

The danger of reverse causality

Still, the danger of consistently reinforcing the tenuous connection between the specific tactics often framed as ways to “fight back” (salary negotiation techniques, financial literacy, selling out a 50-stop stadium tour, etc.) and the larger issues they purport to meaningfully improve or fix (a persistent disparity in income and wealth by gender, women trapped in the low-wage cycle, etc.) is that it suggests a causal relationship where one probably doesn’t exist, and cuts the conversation off at the knees right as it’s starting to go somewhere. 

It’s this phenomenon that morphs giving women advice about, say, how to negotiate more persuasively, into the implicit, perhaps inadvertent suggestion that women not negotiating hard enough is the reason the gender pay gap exists in the first place.

While undoubtedly useful and important for an individual woman, the solution offered—i.e., negotiation advice—isn’t reflective of why she’s statistically likely to earn less over her career, nor is it likely to directly impact the sociocultural norms that thrust women into the false “career vs. family” dichotomy that men don’t face. 

(I remember listening to a panel in college where an audience member directed a question about “work-life balance as a mother” to the only female executive speaking. The exec rejected the premise of the question and instead asked, in not so many words, “why the male executives on the panel weren’t being asked how they balanced their careers with fatherhood.” It was metal as hell. My world tilted ever so slightly on its axis that day, my ears attuned to the high-pitched frequency of sexist dog whistles.)

Contrast that example with a broader discussion of something like universal child care and the impact it would likely have on the gender wage gap for all mothers; the data is clear that statistically, even women who work full-time (including the breadwinning ones!) bear the brunt of unpaid and underpaid caretaking work. While it’s unlikely that universal childcare is a silver bullet (and we’ll explore why in this week’s upcoming episode), we know that industrialized countries that offer this benefit (or even attempt to) tend to have smaller gender wage gaps. 

The advice to negotiate is clean: a series of steps to follow, phrases to memorize, and the immediate gratification of a pay bump. 

Conversely, reckoning with the structure of family and work is nebulous, and makes no such promises of speedy personal enrichment. Whether or not the US ever gets universal childcare is, for most of us, a reality that’s so far outside the realm of our control so as to feel irrelevant. 

It’s no wonder we tend to prefer the individual tactics—the “negotiation advice” of it all—in the personal finance world (and with good reason; my telling you to fight for universal childcare isn’t going to make your take-home pay stretch to cover your current childcare bills any more easily in the meantime!). The tactics matter.

But a lack of financial literacy isn’t the root cause of these issues, which means more of it won’t be the solution

I keep circling this core truth: Financial literacy might help you overcome some of these obstacles in your own life, but a lack of financial literacy is not the reason you’re statistically most likely, as a woman, to experience those wage and wealth gaps in the first place.

And that probably shouldn’t surprise us! A recent study shows that 55% of women and 60% of men feel confident in their financial decision-making; the idea that women lack confidence at high rates or are substantially less informed than their male counterparts is, at best, a false narrative that’s more powerful than the data used to back it up, and at worst, not significant enough to explain the chasm in outcomes.

This is particularly true when one considers the subtext of most of this individual advice, mine included: It mostly applies to women in the narrow stratum of the American workforce considered highly educated, white-collar workers—the subset I was originally trying to reach without realizing it. And make no mistake: It’s incredibly valuable to those women—but there’s something that feels dishonest and self-serving about positioning such advice anywhere in the proximity of activism. 

It’s a worthy challenge to avoid the temptation of conflating personal finance best practices with the hard political work of improving life for all women in our country, particularly those that have long been invisible in this industry: the low-wage workforce, women of color, the working poor, widows, single mothers…the list goes on. 

This, of course, isn’t a revelatory finding, but it’s a phenomenon that seems to persist despite the criticism. How do we accurately calibrate our celebration of individual advancement without pretending as though it’s enough on its own to help all ships rise, not just a select few? 

Where I’ve landed, I think, is that a woman getting rich is not an inherently progressive pursuit—but that doesn’t mean it’s bad, or that it can’t make your life better! And if we want to turn individual wealth acquisition into feminist action, we can support progress for all women by using the power, money, and influence we accrue for ourselves: 

This could look like advocating for gender pay parity with your employer once you’re in a position of power, or fighting for all the women (and men!) employed by your company—not just the corporate ones—to receive the same health and retirement benefits that the salaried people do. 

It could look like using your lucrative law degree to work on legislation that’s good for women (Ruth Bader Ginsburg famously said she’d stop fighting for feminism when there was an all-female Supreme Court, since it had historically been nine men and no one batted an eye). 

It could even look like accumulating enough personal wealth to send your daughters to college, despite the fact that you didn’t get a higher education because you were told growing up your duty was to become a wife and mother, and only your brother got to go.

I’d argue the accrual itself is probably not an intrinsically feminist act—but you can’t empower others without first empowering yourself, which makes it a strong step in the right direction. 

On that note, can I interest you in some negotiation advice?