This is the waves. This is the waves. This is the waves. This is the waves.

Welcome to the waves. Slates 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 Paulis, 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 content director at Funrise. I've basically been leaning in for a long time

and also covering leaning in for a long time. And today we're going to talk about girl bosses,

women entrepreneurs, and the fall of Elizabeth Holmes, who may or may not be a girl boss.

She's currently awaiting trial for fraud for her company Theronos.

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. I read Sophia and Maruso's book Hashtag Girl Boss when it came out

in 2014. I watched the rise of Elizabeth Holmes' Theronos with a mix of like awe and jealousy.

And over the past few days preparing for this, I've been thinking about why I was so attracted to

the rhetoric, especially in Sophia and Maruso's book. And I think the main thing that drove me to it

was that, you know, 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 appealed to me. I didn't like make

up very much at the time. And I was kind of doing what in hindsight was like this slow,

hard, tedious work of building skills and figuring out where I fit into the journalism world and

trying things that didn't work. And being a girl boss in some ways just sort of seem to be like

skipping all of that. Yeah, I mean, that I wanted to talk about the girl boss because I mean,

I've just been thinking about girl bosses. Maybe even before the term girl bosses was a thing,

maybe since I first, um, in 2010 or 2011 watched Cheryl Sandberg's TED Talk,

...