The resignation of Glossier CEO Emily Weiss inspired another wave of obituaries for young, female founders. Nevertheless, they persist—and refuse to be put on glass pedestals again.
n October 2021, Rent the Runway founder Jennifer Hyman took her 12-year-old subscription fashion company public at a $1.7 billion valuation, valuing her 5.1% stake at nearly $49 million. The 41-year-old CEO was one of only about 25 American women in history to go public with a company she had founded. But Rent the Runway’s IPO was even more unusual for not only having a female founder but also a female CFO and a female COO.
Leaning Out: After 8 years of running the beauty brand she founded, Emily Weiss stepped down as CEO of Glossier in May amid turmoil.The Girlboss phenomenon is on Hyman’s mind because in late May, 37-year-old Glossier founder Emily Weiss announced that she was stepping down as CEO from the company she launched in 2014 and, after a maternity leave, becoming executive chairman. Weiss’ beauty business was growing into a $1.
With such meteoric success stories, each of these women was soon hailed as a “Girlboss”—which often came with the benefits of being young, attractive and white. And when their high-flying brands fell back to earth over the next few years, the schadenfreude was relentless.
“When a female founder steps down, it’s a headline like The Death of the Girlboss,” says Laura Behrens Wu, who was featured on the 2017 Forbes 30 Under 30 for founding logistics outfit Shippo. “When a guy does it? There’s no real headline because it happens so frequently that it’s no big deal.” Wu points to 41-year old Flexport founder and CEO Ryan Peterson,soon after Weiss stepped down.
In early June, no less an expert than Sophia Amoruso implored her Twitter followers: “please stop using girlboss thanks.”moruso might be ready to move on, but Rent the Runway’s Jen Hyman and the other founders interviewed by“Sometimes, the positivity that the media has had about the heyday of female founders or Girlbosses has actually made the situation more difficult,” Hyman says, “because it clouds the reality that it's as difficult as ever to raise money as a woman.
Indeed, only 2% of all venture capital goes to female founders, and just 0.2% of all venture funding goes to female founders of color, a rate that has barely budged in the four years since #MeToo and #TimesUp transformed the national dialog.showed that, among some 2,100 startups, the female-founded companies that received money from female investors in early funding rounds werelikely to receive funding in subsequent rounds.
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