Did Elizabeth Holmes Kill the Concept of the Girlboss?
The Waves: Gender, Relationships, Feminism
Slate Podcasts
4.2 • 903 Ratings
🗓️ 9 September 2021
⏱️ 30 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
On this week’s episode of The Waves, Slate Money co-host Emily Peck and Slate senior editor Shannon Palus talk all things #girlboss. They explore how the concept went from being a sought-after status to a ridiculed slogan. Then they dive into the upcoming trial of possible former (and current?) girlboss Elizabeth Holmes and talk about whether potential trial strategies and defenses are sexist.
Recommendations:
Shannon: Jessica Knoll’s 2015 novel, The Luckiest Girl Alive.
Emily: The Cathy comic strip podcast, Aack Cast.
Podcast production by Cheyna Roth with editorial oversight by Susan Matthews and June Thomas.
Send your comments and recommendations on what to cover to thewaves@slate.com
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | You're listening ad-free on Amazon Music. |
| 0:03.6 | This is the waves. |
| 0:05.5 | This is the waves. |
| 0:06.6 | This is the waves. |
| 0:07.7 | This is the waves. |
| 0:08.4 | This is the waves. |
| 0:09.5 | This is the waves. |
| 0:14.1 | Welcome to the waves. |
| 0:17.7 | Slate's podcast about gender, feminism, and girl bosses. Every episode, you get a new pair of women to talk about the thing we can't get off of our minds. And today you've got me, Shannon Paulus, a senior editor at Slate covering health and science. And I'm Emily Peck. I co-host Slate's Money Podcast. I write a newsletter for Fortune about the workplace, and I'm |
| 0:38.6 | content director at Funrise. I've basically been leaning in for a long time and also covering |
| 0:44.7 | leaning in for a long time. And today we're going to talk about girl bosses, women entrepreneurs, |
| 0:50.3 | and the fall of Elizabeth Holmes, who may or may not be a girl boss. |
| 0:54.8 | She's currently awaiting trial for fraud for her company, Theranos. |
| 0:59.1 | I'm interested in talking about this because I feel like I have been kind of the target audience for a lot of the girl boss stuff. |
| 1:07.8 | I read Sophia Amar Russo's book, hashtag Girl Boss, when it came out in 2014. I watched |
| 1:14.7 | the rise of Elizabeth Holmes' Theranos with a mix of, like, awe and jealousy. And over the past |
| 1:22.5 | few days preparing for this, I've been thinking about why I was so attracted to the rhetoric, especially in |
| 1:29.5 | Sophia Maruso's book. And I think the main thing that drove me to it was that, you know, |
| 1:38.0 | I was like 24 or 25 when I read that book. And this idea of conjuring a world where you were successful and powerful, like, really |
| 1:46.4 | appealed to me. I didn't like my job very much at the time. And I was kind of doing what, in hindsight, |
| 1:52.6 | was like, the slow, hard, tedious work of building skills and figuring out where I fit into the journalism world and trying things that |
| 2:04.0 | didn't work. |
... |
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