Musk, Bezos, and Zuck are going full alpha male. America's girlbosses are fed up.
Can you smell the testosterone? Suddenly, America's top CEOs seem to be taking their cues from Logan Roy, Rambo, and, most conspicuously, Donald Trump.
Jiujitsu-fighting, MAGA-fied Mark Zuckerberg went on Joe Rogan's podcast to bemoan corporate culture for becoming "neutered" and called instead for "aggression," saying "masculine energy" is "good" and criticism of it had gone too far. Jamie Dimon has gone on f-bomb-filled screeds about how coddled employees need to get back to the office. A buff Jeff Bezos has laid down the hammer at The Washington Post, demanding editors give him a "hell yes" to affirm they're all in on "personal liberties and free markets." Elon Musk, emboldened by Trump to be more "aggressive," is shouting "chainsaw!" as he makes brutal cuts to the federal bureaucracy. And even if that Zuck-Musk cage match got canceled, the ready-to-rumble spirit persists: Musk posted to X earlier this month that he "literally challenged Putin to one-on-one physical combat over Ukraine."
Not in the least surprised by all this chest-thumping: women in business.
I spoke to several female founders, along with psychologists and sociologists, who see the resurgent machoism in corporate America — and the related dismantling of DEI programs, RTO mandates, layoffs, and calls for "intensity" — as the onset of a new era of backlash. On the one hand, some women fear that aggressive company culture in the Trump 2.0 era may push them out of corporate positions and continue trends like underrepresentation in the tech sector. On the other, some see it as galvanizing. "The backlash is a sign that we're making serious progress," says Maureen Clough, the host of "It Gets Late Early," a podcast about ageism in the workplace, sharing the sentiment of several women I spoke to. "Now we know who these people are," she adds. "The masks and the gloves are off."
While some see these displays of strongmanhood as a means of placating — and fending off regulatory action from — the Trump administration, others see it as seizing the political moment to opportunistically return to masculine norms in the workplace. It's "not about money, it's more about them wanting to have the playground they've always had," says Sapna Cheryan, a professor of psychology at the University of Washington. Jennifer Berdahl, a professor of sociology at the University of British Columbia, uses a similar analogy. "It's like boys in a sandbox but scaling it to billionaires. It's the concept of precarious manhood: Almost no matter how much you succeed, it's just never enough." She adds, "What they're really calling for is for dominance contests to go free, almost like a gladiator arena."
The gladiator games don't just play out among the top alphas — those down the chain watch and learn. After Musk called a researcher a "retard" on X, for example, the use of the slur soon tripled on the platform, a study from Montclair State University found. In a January article titled "Is corporate America going MAGA?" an (ironically) anonymous banker told the Financial Times, "I feel liberated. We can say 'retard' and pussy' without the fear of getting canceled." Gen Z men are less likely than millennial men to say the term "feminist" describes them, according to a 2023 survey from the Survey Center on American Life. Almost half of them said they feel men face discrimination in the US. Meanwhile, only 49% of women feel women in the US are treated with respect and dignity, down from 66% in 2015, a Gallup survey found.
Many women are fed up. And, tired of waiting on corporate America, they're increasingly building their own arenas.
Over the past decade, women have made significant, if uneven, gains in the corporate workforce. Women now make up 10.4% of CEOs at Fortune 500 companies, up from just 4.6% in 2015. The overwhelming majority of this small group is white. Women are now outpacing men in becoming entrepreneurs; today they own nearly 39% of American businesses, increasing the number of women-led companies by 13.6% between 2019 and 2023, a 2024 Wells Fargo report said. Firms owned by men grew by just 7% in the same time period. In Silicon Valley, however, Zuckerberg's "masculine energy" quip doesn't track with reality. As of 2022, women made up just 22% of tech workers. That's the same proportion of jobs they held in 2005, the year after Facebook was founded. Women accounted for 16% of first-time VC-backed entrepreneurs and only 9% of entrepreneurs who get VC-backing for two startups, according to a 2024 paper that looked at aggregate data from Pitchbook.
The promises of the girlboss era, meanwhile, have come up short. In the 2010s, Sheryl Sandberg called on ambitious women to "lean in." Work hard enough, assert yourself, and you can have it all. But the girlboss was an empty caricature, idolizing women who'd squeezed their way into the C-suite while trying old leadership tactics and wearing high heels. They were feminine and white, often thin and privileged. And, as Michelle Obama famously said of "leaning in" in 2018, "That shit doesn't work all the time."
A sprinkling of female founders and executives in a world run by men hasn't transformed it: Toxic workplaces still emerged at several women-led companies. Steph Korey of Away was outed as a Slack bully (she apologized). Glossier workers reported discrimination and mistreatment under founder and former CEO Emily Weiss's tenure (Weiss apologized, too). Elizabeth Holmes lied to investors and risked lives (she apologized, and is serving an 11-year prison sentence). Sandberg herself is facing new allegations of toxic behavior: A new memoir by Sarah Wynn-Williams, a former policy director at Facebook (now Meta), claims that Sandberg had a young assistant sleep in her lap and demanded the author join her in bed on a private jet. The book, "Careless People," also highlights the ways women at Facebook felt leadership had failed them. Meta has slammed the book as inaccurate, calling it a "mix of out-of-date and previously reported claims about the company and false accusations about our executives." A spokesperson for Sandberg's Lean In organization declined to comment on the memoir, but directed me to its website for information about ways Lean In sees itself as evolving to help women of all backgrounds navigate barriers and biases they may face at work.
Even if you have more women, they'll still assimilate to the workplace culture you have.
Erika Lucas, founder of StitchCrew
Women have proved they can behave just as badly as men — but even when they're on their best behavior or make minor missteps, they're hit with harsh criticism men are more likely to evade. A 2020 study from the Stanford Graduate School of Business found that men are more valued than women when they "take charge." The "founder mode," hands-on, direct style of management can backfire for women — as Airbnb CEO and founder mode proselytizer Brian Chesky posted on X last fall: "Women founders have been reaching out to me over the past 24 hours about how they don't have permission to run their companies in Founder Mode the same way men can. This needs to change."
"Even if you have more women, they'll still assimilate to the workplace culture you have," says Erika Lucas, the founder of StitchCrew, a nonprofit focused on fostering equitable entrepreneurship, and VEST, a women's peer network and investment fund. "Women are being conditioned to fit into this meritocracy, or fit within these toxic systems because that's all we have." As Cheryan puts it, "masculine defaults" are diffuse in the workplace "because men made companies in their image. The return of those defaults are pushing more women to ditch corporate America and go out on their own, says Lucas. "The reason why we're seeing more women-led companies starting is because corporate America is not working for women."
When companies won't offer work-from-home policies or flexibility that working parents need, it can embolden people to become more entrepreneurial and build under their own terms. "Oftentimes the easiest way to find that is to build it yourself," says Jaclyn Pascocello, the founder of Fabrik, a networking space for people to grow their communities, noting that it's still not easy to launch a company. But in this climate of ascendant machoism, she says, she is seeing a collective of women coming together at Fabrik and starting to build companies to address issues sometimes ignored by men. Those can include solutions for women's health and caregiving. "It really feels like there's a ton of women trying to lift each other up," she said.
But oversimplifying "masculine" or "feminine" traits to fit narrow boxes "is doing everyone a disservice," says Ashley Rose, the cofounder and CEO of the cybersecurity firm Living Security. "You need to find people that possess the traits that work well in your culture." Similarly, the concept of DEI has been misrepresented and turned into a dirty acronym by the political right, says Virginia Cumberbatch, a global DEI strategist and consultant. While DEI implementation has been lacking and its results disappointing at some firms, there are ways for new and old companies to create initiatives to foster diversity, even in the current political climate. "We've allowed DEI to be a catchall that's kind of lost its meaning," Cumberbatch says. DEI, she says, shouldn't be thought of as a blanket fix. Equity looks different in the work of a university or an architecture firm. And companies that are serious about building diverse, equitable, and inclusive environments need to give authority to the people who work in it at a senior level. "It has to be pervasive in every dimension of your organization or your brand, or it is just rhetoric," she says.
There's no business case for stifling diversity. Many studies have found that having a diverse staff is good for companies financially, and benefits like extended parental leave, caregiving resources, and flexibility help with employee retention and burnout. And Big Tech businesses have ballooned in value while they publicly called for diversity, but they ride the tides of public opinion. Personalities that are power-obsessed often swing politically to hold onto their prestige. With that reality exposed, some women are changing their responses. Vanessa Jupe, the founder of Leva, a platform to support new parents, says she became more politically active in the 2024 election and supported Kamala Harris' campaign by canvassing her neighborhood and donating money. Some Facebook groups dedicated to campaigning for Harris have morphed into places of action, with members organizing to write letters and calling lawmakers to express frustration with the Trump administration. Escalating tactics could include strikes, sit-ins, picketing, and actions like the late February economic blackout targeted at large retailers. "There's a full-frontal assault on women and people of color," Jupe says. "The time to play nice is not now. You cannot have kid gloves on when you're fighting against really silly bullies."
The era of the girlboss is long dead. No singular trope or central figure has taken its place in 2025 — which may be a good thing. "Nobody should be made into a hero," Lucas says. "My hope for women is that we start building power collectively." That also means pushing for change by showing that companies can be "successful because you actually operate it in a different way," Cheryan says. Women have stopped thinking they can "have it all" by leaning in, and instead are calling on men to do more at home and work toward more equitable workplaces — and opting out of marriage and traditional corporate America if they don't.
Leaders who are willing to disrupt corporate culture norms have an enormous opportunity to lure top talent away from workplaces that aren't. We're not likely to see a few women rising through the ranks and joining the boys on stage in a cage match — and that's for the best, but there's a culture shift unfolding that could allow them to make something new.
Amanda Hoover is a senior correspondent at Business Insider covering the tech industry. She writes about the biggest tech companies and trends.
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USA Today
23 minutes ago
- USA Today
Trump says Iran's nuclear sites were 'obliterated.' Were they?
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Iran Stands Alone Against Trump and Israel, Stripped of Allies
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CNN
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Start your week smart: US strikes Iran, Pride rollbacks, Tesla robotaxis, NATO summit, Bezos' wedding
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