Another day, another tech founder biopic – this time it’s the turn of Bumble CEO Whitney Wolfe Herd, courtesy of Swiped, which traces her journey from Tinder co-founder to creator of the rival dating app that would make her the world’s youngest female self-made billionaire.
Cue a glossy trailer in which Wolfe Herd (played by Lily James) is declared ‘the brains behind Tinder’; elsewhere, James gutsily announces that she’s ‘starting a revolution’. Though Wolfe Herd was reportedly not involved with Swiped, if the trailer is anything to go by, the tone is still distinctly hagiographic. And it’s a snippet in which Wolfe Herd bristles after being told by a male colleague to be ‘practical not emotional’ that most clearly telegraphs Swiped’s aspirations – this is a tale of female ambition triumphing over male chauvinism, a narrative that feels like a curious throwback to the girlboss era of the mid-2010s.
Because for a while, girlboss culture – all millennial pink and something called ‘power poses’ – was the prevailing expression of female ambition, defining how young female entrepreneurs were to present themselves. Then came a wave of cancellations in 2020 that saw most, if not all, of those women fall from grace for transgressions ranging from employee mismanagement to allegations of racism; events that yielded a thousand thinkpieces on the hypocrisy of corporate feminism. Very quickly the movement became an object of ridicule within popular culture, the term ‘girlboss’ verging on slur.
And yet the framing of the Bumble biopic confirms something I’ve long suspected – the girlboss is making a return. Many of the female founders ousted in 2020 – Audrey Gelman, founder of Insta-famous women’s co-working space The Wing, for example, or Reformation founder Yael Aflalo – have now embarked on second acts, setting up new businesses and tentatively returning to the limelight. Female founder podcasts are on the rise, too: Rochelle Humes’ Ladies Who Launch bills itself as a ‘girls’ group chat for business and beyond’, while Meghan Markle’s Confessions Of A Female Founder is a valiant (if saccharine) contribution to the girlboss canon.
Even on runways the girlboss uniform of power blazers, chunky ties and louche suiting is all the rage thanks to Saint Laurent’s A/W ’25 collection. All signs point towards the second coming of the girlboss – albeit with one major difference. Because whereas previously the businesses these women ran and personal brands they cultivated leant heavily on their progressive, feminist ideals, this time around those sorts of mission-led declarations are absent. You’ll find no lofty promises about changing the world or empowering women here – heck, even Bumble has ditched its ‘women make the first move’ ethos.
Perhaps that’s to be expected given how much political winds have changed in the last five years; social progressivism is not as lucrative for brands as it once was. And as the saying goes – once bitten, twice shy. Having been put through the wringer for not practising what they preached previously, perhaps female founders have decided this time around it’s safer not to preach anything at all.
Otegha Uwagba is a bestselling author and culture journalist who has written three books: We Need To Talk About Money, Whites: On Race And Other Falsehoods, and Little Black Book: A Toolkit for Working Women.